Winners come second. Or third, even fourth. Just usually not first. I’m talking about birth order: where you fit into the run of your siblings. That’s the takeaway from Mind Games, a new book by Annie Vernon, best known at the Guardian and Observer for a short work placement she did here in 2015, though in the wider world she perhaps has greater fame as a world champion rower who won a silver medal at the 2008 Olympics.
Mind Games sets out to unpick what it is about top‑level athletes that makes them different. For Vernon it’s mostly mental. “You have to be unbelievably, ruthlessly, exceptionally driven,” she writes. It’s the difference between chickens, which is to say most of us, and pigs, who are rare sorts like Vernon. “Think about a plate of bacon and eggs,” she continues, “as the saying goes, the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed.”
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