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Have you ever wondered why movie sequels or remakes and cover songs are never as good as the originals?  And why do so many athletes and singers suffer from the “sophomore jinx”?

I was watching some unknown singer do a cover version of Elton John’s Your Song on SNL, and the question “Why?” came to mind.  Why would anybody ever bother to do a cover version of a song or produce a movie remake or sequel?  They are almost never as good as the originals.  Then I realized that the reason has to do with a statistical phenomenon called regression to the mean.

Regression to the mean refers to the statistical phenomenon that, whenever you obtain an extreme outcome far from the mean, the next trial will almost certainly result in a less extreme outcome closer to the mean.  So, for example, if you get 8 heads out of 10 flips of a fair coin, then, in the next 10 flips, you are likely to get 4, 5, or 6, rather than 10, 9, or even 8 again.  An outcome immediately following an extreme outcome far from the mean moves closer to (or regresses to) the mean.

Whether a given song or movie becomes a huge hit also contains a fixed component (its inherent and true quality) and a random component (all the unpredictable and unknowable factors that go into making it a success or failure in entertainment).  The problem with movie sequels and cover songs is that they only make them when the original was extremely successful.  Nobody produces a remake of a movie that bombed or a cover of a song that flopped.  They only remake “classics” that did extremely well critically or financially.

The law of regression to the mean suggests that Ishtar II and Waterworld II will likely do much better than the originals.  But Hollywood doesn’t gamble on previous failures.  I wish Hollywood would learn about regression to the mean so that it would stop producing movie sequels and cover songs which are guaranteed to disappoint.

To the uninformed, it would be easy to assume that positive psychology and positive thinking are strongly related.  Some might even say, “Finally, science is proving what we have always thought to be true about positive thinking.”  But this is not exactly the case.  While positive thinking and positive psychology may be related, they are more like third cousins than twin brothers.  And anyone who uses one or the other would be benefited by understanding the differences:

Philosophical orientation :  Positive thinking begins with the assumption that positive thinking is good for you.  This is often based on personal or anecdotal experience and then extrapolated to other aspects of life as a general prescription for a better life.  Positive psychology begins with scientific inquiry.  Positive psychology takes some of those assumptions about positive thinking and says, “let’s test them” to see where they hold true or don’t.

Positivity ratios:   Positive thinking generally promotes the “more is better” approach to positivity.  Some proponents of positive thinking would argue that if you don’t have the wealth, health or happiness you want out of life, it’s because you allowed some negativity to creep in.  Only by shutting these thoughts out and focusing on the positive can you be successful.

Positive psychology on the other hand, is about understanding the purpose of positive emotions and understanding the different contexts when they may prove valuable.  Positive psychology is also interested in negative emotions when they help us to flourish in our lives.  Barbara Fredrickson, for example, a researcher who specializes in positive emotions, has found an ideal ratio of 3 positive emotions to every 1 negative emotion for human flourishing.  3:1, not 3:0.

Many researchers in positive psychology are studying the benefits of mindfulness, which means accepting both positive and negative emotions (in whatever ratio they happen to exist) and then acting consciously, while staying true to personal values and goals.  These researchers argue for the importance of a meaningful life over a happy one.

Definitions of optimism:  positive thinking eschews an optimistic outlook even when one isn’t warranted by the situation.  Proponents will suggest “affirmations” for example, where people are told to say out loud things they wish to be true, even if they aren’t (e.g. “I make a million dollars a year!”)  Positive psychology studies why optimism is sometimes beneficial (and sometimes not.)  Psychology researchers don’t generally promote uninhibited optimism in all situations.

As Martin Seligman, the author of Learned Optimism, says, “you don’t want the pilot who is de-icing the wings of your plane to be an optimist.”  Another psychologist, Sandra Schneider, promotes “realistic optimism,” which is a matter of trying to realistically get to the truth of a matter, but where ambiguity lies in the meaning of a situation, favor the more positive assumption that will bring you greater mental wellbeing.

The reality is, much of what the positive thinking movement has proposed has shown some validity, and this is why people do get benefit out of reading The Secret or attending Tony Robbins’ seminars.  Barbara Fredrickson has identified “upward spirals” to show how our positive emotions tend to reverberate off of those around us, sustaining and amplifying their benefits.  And Martin Seligman has studied the benefits of favoring more optimistic thinking styles.  But positive thinking is a one-note song that falls flat in certain situations, while positive psychology is about understanding the rich complexity of the positive side of life.

Carol Dweck, Daniel Coyle, and Noel Tichy all point out that you need to stretch to learn new things.

First, this passage from Carol Dweck …

My colleagues and I have conducted interventions with adolescents in which they learn that their brains and intellect are malleable. They discover that when they stretch themselves to learn new things, their neurons form new connections and they can, over time, enhance their intellectual skills. Compared to a control group that learned only study skills, these students showed marked improvements in motivation, and their declining grades were sharply reversed. Researchers Catherine Good and Joshua Aronson have found similar effects. In studies led by David Yeager, high school students who were taught a malleable view of their intellectual and social skills showed positive changes in their grades, stress level, conduct (including aggression), and health that lasted over the course of the school year.

Second, this passage from The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills:

There is a place, right on the edge of your ability, where you learn best and fastest. It’s called the sweet spot. … the underlying pattern is the same: Seek out ways to stretch yourself. Play on the edges of your competence. As Albert Einstein said, “One must develop an instinct for what one can just barely achieve through one’s greatest efforts.”

The key word is “barely.”

Finally, this passage from Deliberate Practice:

Noel Tichy, professor at the University of Michigan business school and the former chief of General Electric’s famous management development center at Crotonville, puts the concept of practice into three zones: the comfort zone, the learning zone, and the panic zone.

Most of the time we’re practicing we’re really doing activities in our comfort zone. This doesn’t help us improve because we can already do these activities easily. On the other hand, operating in the panic zone leaves us paralyzed as the activities are too difficult and we don’t know where to start. The only way to make progress is to operate in the learning zone, which are those activities that are just out of reach.

Another great post on the Farnam Street Blog. Worth subscribing to.

PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE : Anita Eerland and Rolf Zwaan [THE NETHERLANDS] and Tulio Guadalupe [PERU, RUSSIA, and THE NETHERLANDS] for their study “Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller”

PEACE PRIZE : The SKN Company [RUSSIA], for converting old Russian ammunition into new diamonds.

ACOUSTICS PRIZE : Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada [JAPAN] for creating the SpeechJammer — a machine that disrupts a person’s speech, by making them hear their own spoken words at a very slight delay.

NEUROSCIENCE PRIZE : Craig Bennett, Abigail Baird, Michael Miller, and George Wolford [USA], for demonstrating that brain researchers, by using complicated instruments and simple statistics, can see meaningful brain activity anywhere — even in a dead salmon.

CHEMISTRY PRIZE : Johan Pettersson [SWEDEN and RWANDA]. for solving the puzzle of why, in certain houses in the town of Anderslöv, Sweden, people’s hair turned green.

LITERATURE PRIZE : The US Government General Accountability Office, for issuing a report about reports about reports that recommends the preparation of a report about the report about reports about reports.

PHYSICS PRIZE : Joseph Keller [USA], and Raymond Goldstein [USA and UK], Patrick Warren, and Robin Ball [UK], for calculating the balance of forces that shape and move the hair in a human ponytail.

FLUID DYNAMICS PRIZE : Rouslan Krechetnikov [USA, RUSSIA, CANADA] and Hans Mayer [USA] for studying the dynamics of liquid-sloshing, to learn what happens when a person walks while carrying a cup of coffee.

ANATOMY PRIZE : Frans de Waal [The Netherlands and USA] and Jennifer Pokorny [USA] for discovering that chimpanzees can identify other chimpanzees individually from seeing photographs of their rear ends.

MEDICINE PRIZE : Emmanuel Ben-Soussan and Michel Antonietti [FRANCE] for advising doctors who perform colonoscopies how to minimize the chance that their patients will explode.

Michelle Craske, a professor of psychology at UCLA and the senior author of the study says:

“The implication [of this research] is to encourage patients to label the emotional responses they are experiencing and label the characteristics of the stimuli — to verbalize their feelings. That lets people experience the very things they are afraid and say, ‘I feel scared and I’m here.’ They’re not trying to push it away and say it’s not so bad. Be in the moment and allow yourself to experience whatever you’re experiencing. “

This strategy is very similar to what Buddhists have been practicing for thousands of years. In mindfulness meditation, practitioners often make “mental notes” of the thoughts and emotions they are experiencing in the moment. This is believed to help individuals overcome these negative states by gaining greater awareness and insight.

These findings are also now backed by some neuroscience. There is a part of the brain called the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex that plays a major role in emotional regulation. Brain researchers have found that this part of the brain is active when we label our feelings and emotional reactions.