Mel Harbour

Chief Timekeeper for @WEHORR

@[email protected]

[john milbank @johnmilbank3]

Peterhouse in the 1980s: the last days of old Cambridge https://t.co/tXelDNAEC2

[Steve Magness @stevemagness]

Ilia Malinin hadn't lost in 2 years.

Two time world champ. The only human to land all of the quad jumps.

Then...his brain betrayed him.

"All the traumatic moments of my life really just started flooding my head, and there were just so many negative thoughts that just flooded into there. And I just did not handle it."

Choking is a threat disorder. Your brain is a prediction machine. Before any big moment, it calculates:

Past experience + current environment + the story you're telling yourself = predicted state.

When that prediction is threat, your brain protects. It latches on to confirming evidence. Ignores the rest. Fear feeds the prediction. The prediction feeds the fear.

Malinin experienced this in real time. He stumbled in the team event days before. His brain coded "Olympics = danger." It had evidence to support the spiral. By the free skate, the loop was cemented.

"All the traumatic moments of my life really just started flooding my head."

His brain was no longer in the present. It was prosecuting the past. Replaying every negative voice or experience to try to convince him to run away, to escape the situation.

His protective brain was on overdrive, and his brain was convinced the situation was life or death.

When an expert chokes, they regress. The brain shifts from autopilot to micromanagement. Our smooth, automated movements become segmented, like a six-year-old learning to throw a ball. This is partly because with the heightened threat state, the link between perception and action gets severed.

Nothing "feels" right. And we compensate by over-controlling. So we're thinking about every step along the way. And the end result is disaster.

Malinin's quad axel requires mass amounts of trust in thousands of hours of training.

Under threat, his conscious mind tried to control what should have been automatic. It's like pulling back a slingshot and instead of letting it go, trying to push it forward.

What drives our brain to move from slight underperformance to "choking" disaster?

1. Identity Cementation

This threat gets turned up to 11 if our sense of self is deeply intertwined with the outcome.

Malinin arrived as the Quad God. It's his Instagram handle, on his warm-up gear, it's his identity.

When your identity IS the performance, your brain treats failure as existential.

The brain doesn't register "I might lose." It registers "I might lose myself."

When Rick Ankiel got the yips, he explained it in similar terms, "I made the mistake of thinking, being good at baseball is what made me who I was. When that glass is shattered, there was nothing left. Going from baseball's prodigy and poster boy. All of the sudden you are blindsided. You're the most vulnerable you've ever been, and everybody can see right through you."

The harsh irony of performing well is you have to care a lot, and try hard...But caring and trying can be your downfall. Your brain registers caring as a signal that this is sefl-defining, you prime the fear/threat centers, and before you know it, your brain's stress response is freezing, fleeing, dissociating to protect itself.

The key is to care a lot...but having just enough space between you and the thing...

2. Mistake Spiral

The second item that causes us to move from underperformance to choking is the compounding of our mistakes.

Research shows that after a mistake, we get a distinct error signal, an involuntary attention shift, and what amounts to an internal handbrake: motor commands temporarily get suppressed.

If we linger there, the pause becomes rumination. The rumination transforms into catastrophizing.

It's why processing mistakes and failures, taking away their sting is so important.

3. Judgement --> Self-Protection

We don’t choke in practice.

We do so when we are being evaluated or judged, and in front of others. When something meaningful is at stake and we have an audience.

We have a social self-preservation system that is on the lookout for anything that might threaten our social status.

If our self-preservation system is inundated with constant signs and signals that our social status is going in the wrong direction, our system becomes hyperresponsive.
---
So how do we get out of protection mode?

1. Acknowledge the moment is big. Don't fight it.

2. Build an identity broader than any single performance.

3. Be the defense attorney. Give yourself evidence.

4. Find something you can control. The smallest thing you can impact that moves you forward

5. Surround yourself with people who love and care for you no matter what. Good vibes are contagious

6. Simulate the worse. Michael Phelps called it playing the tape. And you have to visualize the disaster, to make sure your brain doesn't freak out.

Before the Olympics, Malinin told ESPN he was treating it "like any other competition."

Afterward: "I honestly definitely underestimated it."

This is one of the most common pieces of advice in sport. Your brain isn't dumb. It sees the Olympic rings, the cameras, and the weight of expectation.

When you tell yourself "just another day" and your brain knows it isn't, the mismatch doesn't calm the system. It alarms it further. It's a prediction error that alerts the brain that our previous stress response isn't good enough. This is NOT just another day, so sound the alarm. And...we overshoot the response, moving to full dread.

It's not too different than what runners experience during preliminary races. They think, this is going to be easy, I should qualify with ease and be able to run slower. But...that mindset primes the brain to overreact to the first sign of discomfort.

The day before he set the world record in the mile (3:51), Jim Ryun wrote in his log "That was hard!" for a 4:07 prelim mile. He ran 16 seconds faster in the final, reporting it "felt easy." The only difference was the expectations going in.

Don't pretend the moment is small. Acknowledge reality. And remind yourself that you are prepared to meet it.

The best of the best feel the same nerves you do.

The same doom loop fires when you freeze during a presentation, go blank in a job interview, or can't find the words in a hard conversation.

It's a human problem. A stress response designed to protect us from lions, tigers, and where being separated from the tribe went death.

We can't fight biology. But we can learn to work with it better.

[Nicholas Boys Smith @boys_nicholas]

Why are the plans for the Palace? Of Westminster so bad & what can we do?

For @TheCriticMag I read 128 pages of “Delivering restoration & renewal of the Palace of Westminster: the costed proposals” report so that you don’t have to. It’s worse than you think. 🧵 …

[trish @TrisH0x2A]

kubernetes is the most over-engineered solution to a problem most companies don't have.

[Dr Anton Howes @antonhowes]

Imagine being an explorer in the fifteenth century and having to deal with this BS. Only on the green lines did their compass *actually* point due north.

[Alex Taylor @adntaylor]

My favourite @ScottAdamsSays story still has to be when he was asked by @Logitech‘s co-founder, Pierluigi Zappacosta, to pretend to be a consultant – called Ray Mebert, naturally – to lead their exec team into making the dumbest mission statement ever.

Demonstrating, perfectly, the dangers of design by committee, they came up with the following:

“The New Ventures Mission is to scout profitable growth opportunities in relationships, both internally and externally, in emerging, mission inclusive markets, and explore new paradigms and then filter and communicate and evangelize the findings.”

Genius. RIP, Scott.

[(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻) @dizzy_thinks]

GenZ don't understand real pain.

[Robert Colvile @rcolvile]

I've signed. So should you https://t.co/p4d4lnJhjS

[Annunziata Rees-Mogg @zatzi]

@christiancalgie The Russian for train station is вокзал (vokzal) because Tsar Nicholas I came to England and was impressed by Vauxhall train station…

[Joanna Hardy-Susskind @Joanna__Hardy]

A few days ago, David Lammy wrote a letter to the Justice Committee answering some questions about his proposals to restrict jury trial.

This is a welcome step.

It’s a telling letter.

But not for the reasons you might think.

🪡 🧵

[Mel Harbour @melharbour]

@ChrisHowellFCA Feel like, starting from a position of zero knowledge, I'd be happy to do it for, say £5m...

Can't be that hard!

[Anton Martyniuk @AntonMartyniuk]

12 years as a .NET developer – in 60 seconds

I have learned many lessons.
Some of them were painful, others were priceless.

Here are the 40 most important takeaways 👇

0. The best code is the one you don't write

1. You're not paid to write code - you're paid to solve problems

2. Everything is a trade-off. There's no "best" tool

3. Write code that other developers will enjoy working with

4. Write meaningful commit messages

5. First make it work, then make it pretty

6. Ship early, iterate often

7. Estimations are never true

8. Refactor continuously and incrementally

9. Code reviews improve more than just quality — they improve teams

10. Never trust user input.

11. Log precisely, not excessively.

12. Automate everything that can be automated

13. Complexity kills project, don't over-engineer

14. Fix root causes, not symptoms

15. Measure first, optimize second

16. Minimize coupling, maximize cohesion

17. Keep third-party dependencies minimal and well-managed

18. Never hard-code sensitive information

19. Errors should fail loudly and immediately

20. Choose clarity over cleverness

21. Choose descriptive naming over explanatory comments

22. Favor composition over inheritance

23. Complexity doesn't scale; simplicity does

24. Respect the principle of least surprise

25. Remove unused code without hesitation

26. Think and code in small, testable units

27. Be consistent with your coding standards

28. Abstraction should hide complexity, not create it

29. Favor explicit over implicit

30. Every line of code should justify its existence

31. Always strive to understand the business behind the code

32. Keep Pull Requests small and manageable

33. Invest in CI/CD right from the start

34. Design APIs that are easy to use correctly and hard to misuse

35. Document why, not just what

36. Forget about "it works on my machine"

37. Be aware of technical debt; repay it incrementally

38. Balance YAGNI ("You Aren’t Gonna Need It") with thoughtful design

39. Ask for help when you're stuck

40. Never stop learning and questioning your assumptions

——

👉 Join 𝟭𝟱,𝟬𝟬𝟬+ people in the best .NET and Software Architecture Newsletter. Weekly best practices, real-world examples, and pro tips to craft better software today!

Link in the featured section of my profile.

𝗕𝗼𝗻𝘂𝘀: every subscriber gets a PDF with 650+ exclusive resources for mastering C#, .NET, ASP .NET Core, EF Core, and Microservices.

——

♻️ Repost to help other developers learn these 40 lessons in minutes, not years

➕ Follow me ( @AntonMartyniuk ) to improve your .NET Skills

[Conservative Friends of Cycling & Walking @ToryCycling]

Memo to public realm designers. Build the desire line first time around - save time and money later...

[Mel Harbour @melharbour]

@RufusSG It's like the analysis that shows that whether commentators describe balls as too short or a good length is just down to results. Length is the same regardless

[Sir Humphrey @pinstripedline]

Possibly my favourite Grauniad correction of all time!

[Mel Harbour @melharbour]

@oldelvet @BritishRowing @WEHORR Yeah, that's what they previously had that I was using. Path root, then club code.gif was working nicely. Poor database design as well to not use the primary identifier that was *right there* for them...

[Mel Harbour @melharbour]

Boo - @BritishRowing have changed the way their Club Finder works and the nicely descriptive links to the blade designs no longer link up easily, so I can't produce a spotters guide for the @WEHORR

[Christopher Snowdon @cjsnowdon]

A letter in the Economist from someone who has enough of the ultra-processed food quackery. 🙌

[Mel Harbour @melharbour]

@adntaylor @LwtEmmaBird once got recognised by an ex of mine for being 'the only person who talks about rowing nearly as much as Mel'. Kidnappers wouldn't stand a chance with either of us...

[Sarah Harbour @LwtEmmaBird]

Absolutely - don't think I've ever seen a food delivery rider on these sorts of bikes ever use the pedals around Cambridge.