PDF Summary:The Winner Effect, by Ian Robertson

What influences success? Why do some people find it easy to go after what they want while others struggle to take action? And when success finally comes, why do some people thrive on it while others falter?

In The Winner Effect, neuropsychologist Ian Robertson argues that five interrelated factors shape your ability to achieve, maintain, and build upon success: the type of motivation that drives you, your parents’ influence, your access to opportunities, the way your hormones and neurochemicals respond to success and stress, and your social status.

Our guide walks you through these five factors, explaining their impact on your ability to succeed and thrive. You’ll gain insight into how you’ve achieved your current level of success and why you respond to success the way you do. We’ll also supplement Robertson’s insights with scientific and psychological research, as well as tips from self-improvement practitioners and success coaches.

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Attachment Theory: Secure Versus Anxious Attachment

Attachment theory clarifies Robertson’s argument, suggesting that your sense of control as a child shaped your basic orientation to the world—and, consequently, your approach to success.

Role models who let their children act autonomously while providing support when needed foster secure attachment: a stable sense of self and of safety in relationships. Children with secure attachment styles see the world as a safe place to explore, and understand themselves as capable individuals who can handle challenges. This fundamental sense of security about their place in the world leads to confidence in their judgment and ability to navigate new situations.

Role models who are overly protective or controlling foster anxious attachment, marked by excessive dependence and fear of separation. Children with an anxious attachment style see the world as unpredictable or threatening and understand themselves as incapable of facing challenges alone. This fundamental insecurity about their place in the world leads to a persistent need for reassurance and difficulty in trusting their judgment.

Factor #3: Opportunities

The third factor influencing your ability to achieve, maintain, and build upon success is your access to opportunities. Robertson defines opportunities as events or circumstances that provide potential for growth, advancement, or achievement. These can arise from various sources, including education, work environments, social connections, and chance encounters. Robertson emphasizes that potential advantages only become opportunities when you recognize and act upon them—without the ability to spot and seize promising situations, even the most favorable circumstances will pass you by.

Encountering opportunities early on in life creates a snowball effect, increasing your chances of achieving ongoing success. Robertson explains that opportunities provide challenges that force you to learn and develop new skills. This enhances your confidence, making you more likely to seek out and capitalize on future opportunities. Additionally, opportunities help you meet new people, expanding your network with connections that often lead to further opportunities. For example, being given a chance to work on a high-profile project early in your career helps you refine your presentation skills and showcase your talents to influential people in your industry, leading to job offers that further advance your career.

Limited Access to Opportunities Blocks Progress

On the other hand, limited access to opportunities can hinder your chances of success, regardless of your abilities or motivation. According to Robertson, not having chances to develop and showcase your skills limits your access to information, resources, and people—causing you to fall behind peers who have had these chances to prove themselves. This can diminish your confidence, leading to a sense of helplessness that prevents you from recognizing or acting upon opportunities when they do arise. For example, if you’re unable to afford unpaid internships in your desired field, you might struggle to gain the experience necessary to move up in your career.

Cumulative Advantage Theory Explains How Opportunities Work

Cumulative advantage theory offers insight into how opportunities shape long-term success, explaining both the snowball effect of early advantages and the persistent impact of limited access to opportunities.

According to this theory, opportunity structures—social and institutional systems that control who can access resources and advancement—systematically amplify initial advantages or disadvantages. If you have early access to opportunities, these structures provide you with additional resources, connections, and knowledge, enhancing your ability to recognize and capitalize on future chances. On the other hand, if you lack early opportunities, these same structures can exclude you from critical pathways for advancement, making it increasingly difficult to catch up to your more advantaged peers.

Further, if you miss out on early opportunities, you may develop a form of opportunity blindness. Without exposure to the subtle cues and contexts that signal opportunity in professional settings, you might struggle to recognize potential advantages even when they do arise. This compounds your initial disadvantage, making it increasingly challenging to break into opportunity-rich environments over time.

The theory also emphasizes how opportunities beget more opportunities through status-based rewards. When you successfully capitalize on an early opportunity, you often receive disproportionate recognition. This creates a halo effect where your perceived competence in one area leads others to assume you’re competent in other areas as well. As a result, you’re offered more opportunities based on this perceived status rather than solely on your skills, further widening the gap between you and those who lacked early advantages.

Factor #4: Neurochemical and Hormonal Responses

The fourth factor influencing your ability to achieve, maintain, and build upon success is your biology—specifically, the neurochemicals and hormones your body releases when you anticipate or experience success. According to Robertson, three chemicals influence these responses: dopamine, testosterone, and cortisol.

Chemical 1: Dopamine

Robertson explains that each time you experience success, your brain releases dopamine, a pleasurable neurochemical designed to reward and reinforce success-generating behaviors. In other words, each time you perform an action that leads to success, you feel a surge of pleasure that makes you want to repeat that action, potentially leading to further achievements. For example, when a business executive closes a deal, they experience a dopamine rush that motivates them to pursue more negotiations.

(Shortform note: Experts add that in addition to creating pleasurable feelings, dopamine encourages success-generating behaviors by improving your memory. When you successfully complete a task or goal, you first feel happy, then the dopamine helps your brain store the memory of that happiness. This memory motivates you to try again and reminds you how to succeed the next time you attempt that task. Dopamine-enhanced memory is a good thing, in that it helps you learn and succeed more easily in the future, but it can also have a negative influence, as it can form bad habits by motivating you to repeat pleasurable but unhealthy behaviors.)

Dopamine Dependency Impairs Judgment

However, Robertson adds that just as with addictive substances or behaviors, your brain can become dependent on the dopamine high that comes with success. This dependency can lead you to make poor decisions in pursuit of that feeling, potentially jeopardizing your long-term success. For example, the business executive might neglect essential operational issues to focus solely on closing deals, compromising the company’s overall health.

(Shortform note: Research clarifies why dopamine dependency occurs and how it can lead to poor decisions: Repeated exposure to pleasure trains your brain to develop a tolerance to dopamine. This means that over time, you need increasingly larger doses of dopamine to feel the same level of pleasure. However, the more you trigger dopamine production, the less effective it becomes and the more you have to escalate your dopamine-seeking behavior to achieve the same high. Fortunately, you may be able to reset your dopamine tolerance through dopamine fasting: If you don’t trigger dopamine production for a while, your brain will be much more sensitive to it when you do experience it next.)

Chemical 2: Testosterone

When you experience success, your body increases your testosterone levels. Robertson explains that this hormone creates both immediate and long-term effects: It boosts your confidence and willingness to take risks in the short term and, with repeated successes over time, it accumulates in your bloodstream to reinforce these traits. This increases your desire to face obstacles and pursue increasingly challenging opportunities. For example, increased testosterone levels might drive the business executive to expand into new markets that they previously considered too challenging.

(Shortform note: While experiencing success can increase testosterone levels, research suggests that this increase is too small and transient to result in long-term accumulation in the bloodstream. This implies that repeated experiences of success directly reinforce traits like confidence and risk-taking not through a physical buildup of testosterone, but through the experiences themselves.)

High Testosterone Alienates Others

While increased testosterone can boost both short-term and long-term confidence, Robertson warns that excessively high levels can result in increased aggression, impulsivity, and reduced empathy. These behaviors can alienate others, lead to poor strategic choices, and ultimately undermine the very success that led to the testosterone increase in the first place. For example, the business executive might ignore advice and dismiss a lucrative partnership opportunity because they’re overly confident in their ability to succeed alone.

(Shortform note: While Robertson argues that testosterone causes behaviors that either foster success or lead to its downfall, Robert Sapolsky (Behave) offers a more nuanced perspective: Testosterone’s effects are highly context-dependent. Rather than simply boosting confidence or causing aggression, testosterone amplifies existing tendencies within specific social contexts. For example, if you’re naturally inclined to cooperate and are in a collaborative environment, increased testosterone might enhance prosocial behaviors. Or, if you tend to be competitive and are in a hierarchical setting, it might intensify assertive or dominant behaviors.)

Chemical 3: Cortisol

While dopamine and testosterone are directly linked to experiencing success, cortisol plays a different role—increasing the likelihood of that experience happening in the first place. Robertson explains that your body releases cortisol, a stress hormone that prepares your body to take flight or fight, whenever you feel anxious or challenged. In moderate amounts, cortisol contributes to success by helping you stay alert and focused in challenging situations. For example, a small jolt of cortisol might help the business executive recall crucial details during an important negotiation.

Chronic Cortisol Impairs Health and Performance

However, while cortisol can help you succeed, it can backfire when you feel ongoing pressure to maintain your level of success. Robertson explains that this pressure can lead to chronically high levels of cortisol that disrupt almost all your body’s processes, resulting in impaired cognitive function, a weakened immune system, and an increased risk of mental health issues. For example, if the business executive feels perpetually stressed about maintaining their performance, they might feel too drained to focus during the negotiation.

Attitude Impacts Cortisol Levels

Kelly McGonigal (The Upside of Stress) adds nuance to the role cortisol plays in success: Its impact depends on whether you feel positively or negatively about the challenge in front of you.

When you welcome a challenge, your brain releases balancing hormones like DHEA and oxytocin that prevent cortisol levels from spiking. This balance allows cortisol to work synergistically with other hormones, improving cognitive function and performance.

However, unwelcome challenges cause cortisol to rapidly spike and miss out on these balancing effects of other hormones, resulting in impaired cognitive function and performance. As Robertson says, these rapid spikes can accumulate over time, leading to long-term health effects like faster aging, suppressed immunity, and greater susceptibility to illnesses.

McGonigal’s insights suggest you can harness the benefits of cortisol and avoid spikes and accumulation by being more discerning about the challenges you pursue. This might involve choosing challenges you can genuinely view as opportunities, or reframing unavoidable challenges as opportunities rather than threats when appropriate.

Factor #5: Social status

The fifth factor influencing your ability to achieve, maintain, and build upon success is your social status—how you’re perceived and treated by others within your social and professional circles. According to Robertson, high social status is both an outcome of prior success and a catalyst for future success. With each success, your status increases, opening doors to new opportunities. This dynamic creates a self-reinforcing cycle that can propel you toward further accomplishments.

He argues that a high social status fosters ongoing success by eliciting positive feedback from others: People expect you to succeed based on your previous achievements and reputation. This expectation leads them to behave in ways that facilitate your ongoing success—they listen to your ideas, assuming they must be valuable. They’re also more inclined to ignore your mistakes, assuming that someone of your status doesn’t make errors. As a result, you have more latitude to exert your influence and shape your environment in ways that support your success.

For example, grant committees might view a renowned scientist’s research proposals more favorably. As a result, the scientist is able to secure funding that enables her to continue producing groundbreaking work.

(Shortform note: The Pygmalion effect offers additional insights on how high expectations perpetuate success. The more people expect you to succeed, the more you internalize their high expectations, seeing yourself as someone capable of meeting increasingly elevated standards. This internalization process upgrades your beliefs about your capabilities. As a result, your behavior naturally shifts to match this new self-perception, making it increasingly easier to take advantage of the opportunities afforded you, consistently perform at a higher level, and further reinforce your high status.)

High Social Status Breeds Overconfidence

However, Robertson warns that preferential treatment can lead you astray, distorting your behavior in ways that undermine your success. He explains that being surrounded by people who primarily affirm your decisions can cause you to become overconfident. You might start to believe that your elevated status means you always know best, disregarding valuable input and failing to consider the perspectives and needs of others. Additionally, the qualities that helped you succeed might diminish as you gain more power and status. This occurs because high status can insulate you from the everyday challenges and interactions that initially honed your skills.

For example, a CEO who rose through the ranks due to their team-building skills loses touch with the day-to-day operations and the needs of their employees as they spend more time at the top. As a result, they become increasingly autocratic, undermining the collaborative culture that led to their initial success.

How Hubris Syndrome Undermines Success

Psychologists explain that the downsides of preferential treatment occur due to hubris syndrome, a mindset that can develop after being in power for some time, leading people to:

• View the world as a means of self-glorification

• Conflate themselves with their organization

• Have contempt for others

• Lose contact with reality

• Become impulsive

• Feel morally justified in their actions, no matter how unethical, practical, or costly

• Lose interest in details

• Become vulnerable to manipulation by people who recognize their need for flattery and use it to influence their decisions

They suggest that the most effective way to inhibit these behaviors—thereby avoiding the pitfalls of preferential treatment Robertson describes—is to practice self-awareness, ask for and act on feedback, and take on duties beneath your station. Combined, these methods will help you become more aware of your attitude and behaviors, prevent you from believing you always know best, and keep you humble and grounded.