The Expert’s Trap
"The irony is that we are more likely to achieve something if we let go of our need to achieve it." - Alan Watts (on Wu Wei)
Too much motivation can make you choke
In 2024, neuroscientists at Carnegie Mellon recorded something no one had ever visualized before: the exact moment a brain chokes.
They were tracking neural population activity in the motor cortex of primates performing precision tasks under varying reward conditions -- a model that closely mirrors human motor architecture. When the reward got large enough, neural activity literally migrated away from the region responsible for successful execution. Not because the subject was nervous. Not because they were distracted. Because they wanted it too much.
The finding, published in Neuron by researchers at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh, overturns the comfortable narrative that choking is about anxiety or lack of preparation. It is neither. It is a collapse in motor preparation triggered by over-motivation -- the neural equivalent of a system overload at the exact moment the stakes demand peak output (Smoulder et al., 2024, Neuron).
If you are a founder who has ever walked into a Series A pitch knowing everything cold and still blanked on your own unit economics, this paper explains what happened inside your skull.
Neural Collapse
Motivation improves performance -- up to a point. Increasing the reward signal sharpens neural discriminability: the brain gets better at distinguishing between successful and unsuccessful movement patterns. Your pattern recognition tightens. Your decision-making accelerates. You become, in every measurable sense, sharper.
Beyond that threshold, the excessive reward signal induces what the researchers call a “spread” in neural activity -- motor preparation diffuses away from the precise neural region that produces successful execution. The brain does not shut down. It does not freeze in the way we colloquially describe stage fright. It actively reorganizes itself into a less effective configuration. You are not failing to try. You are trying so hard that the trying itself degrades the machinery.
Consider the inverted-U of confidence the performance literature has documented: overconfident athletes reduce preparation effort, develop arrogance that impairs coachability, and underestimate opponents. But under-confident athletes hesitate, second-guess, and withdraw. The sweet spot is calibrated confidence -- realistic, not maximized (Lochbaum et al., 2022, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health). The same inverted-U applies to motivation itself. You need enough to perform. Too much, and the neural preparation collapses.
Practice Can Paralyze
Paradoxically, the expertise you develop can make things harder for you when making a decision. Experts store skills as implicit programs. Years of deliberate practice compress complex decision chains into automatic routines that execute without conscious oversight. This is what expertise is -- the conversion of effortful, step-by-step processing into fluid, chunked execution. Much of the performance of the world experts in a field happens from years of repeated, deliberate practice that more or less makes the finest details of their craft more or less unconscious - i.e. the repeated behaviours become more or less engraved in your own psyche.
Under high-stakes conditions, the brain shifts from automatic to explicit processing. You begin consciously monitoring the routines that were running perfectly well without supervision. And this monitoring -- this well-intentioned attempt to ensure everything goes right -- is precisely what causes it to go wrong. Beilock’s research demonstrates that pressure triggers explicit monitoring of proceduralized skills, which “de-chunks” integrated sequences into their component parts, degrading the speed and fluidity that define expertise (Beilock, University of Chicago).
That moment you start second guessing yourself is not because you were under-prepared. You were over-monitoring. Your expertise was intact. Your conscious mind just decided to supervise it into dysfunction.
Here is the counterintuitive point: a mild distraction -- humming a tune, counting backward, focusing on a single external target -- actually improves expert performance under pressure. Because the distraction occupies the conscious mind just enough to prevent it from interfering with the automatic routines that produce expert execution. The expert performs better when part of their attention is elsewhere.
“Highly skilled golfers are more likely to hole a simple 3-foot putt when we give them the tools to stop analyzing their shot, to stop thinking. Even a simple trick like singing helps prevent portions of the brain that might interfere with performance from taking over.” — Sian Beilock
This only works for experts. Beginners have no automaticity to protect. They need conscious control. But for the founder who has done the reps, who knows the material cold, who has built the pattern library through years of experience -- trying harder is the wrong prescription.
And the practice paradox makes this worse: deliberate practice explains less than 1% of performance variance at the elite level.
A landmark meta-analysis by Macnamara, Moreau, and Hambrick examined 34 studies involving 2,765 athletes and found that once you reach the top tier, everyone has accumulated enormous practice volume. The variance between top performers is driven by factors beyond practice -- psychological traits, perceptual-cognitive abilities, and the capacity to perform under conditions that disrupt automaticity (Macnamara et al., 2016, Perspectives on Psychological Science).
Among experienced founders, the same holds. You have all done the reps. You have all built the pattern libraries. What separates you in the room where the stakes are highest is not how much you prepared. It is whether your mental preparation survives contact with pressure.
The Two Zones: Flow vs. Clutch
Flow state. The zone. The effortless absorption where time disappears and everything clicks. Csikszentmihalyi’s framework has dominated performance psychology for fifty years, and for good reason -- it describes a real and powerful experience. A 2023 study, the first to focus specifically on flow among startup founders, found that founders enter flow during creative tasks, strategic work, and product development (PLOS ONE, 2023)
But flow has a precondition that makes it structurally unavailable in the moments where you need performance most.
Flow requires challenge-skill balance in a low-threat environment. It emerges when the task matches your ability, when goals are clear, when the context feels safe enough for absorption. Building product in your apartment at 2am. Writing the deck alone in a coffee shop. Debugging a system architecture problem with your co-founder on a whiteboard. These are flow environments.
A Series A pitch is not a flow environment. A board meeting where the company’s survival is at stake is not a flow environment. An acquisition negotiation with a corporate development team that holds all the leverage is not a flow environment.
These are pressure environments. They demand a different state entirely.
A 2025 review in the Journal of Applied Sport Psychology by Jackman, Swann, and colleagues documents a paradigm shift in how researchers understand peak performance. The field is moving from a single-state model to what they call a “multiple states paradigm.” Excellent performance arises from at least two distinct psychological architectures: Flow (effortless, absorbed, no ego involvement) and Clutch (effortful, intense, high deliberate engagement under pressure). Both produce peak outcomes. They run on different cognitive machinery (Jackman et al., 2025, Journal of Applied Sport Psychology).
Flow emerges through positive events and open goals. Clutch states emerge under pressure with specific goals and a conscious decision to increase effort. Flow feels like effortless mastery. Clutch feels like controlled intensity. Both are legitimate paths to excellent performance.
You can’t use flow to deal with clutch situations. Many founders will naturally try to relax into unknowns and threats. They try to find the zone. They try to make the high-stakes pitch feel like building product. And when the effortless absorption does not arrive -- because it cannot arrive in a threat environment. They are choking because they are trying to reach the wrong zone.
The founders who perform best in high-pressure moments are not the ones who have learned to make every situation feel like flow. They are the ones who have learned to operate in Clutch: deliberate, aware, effortful, and fully engaged with the pressure rather than trying to transcend it.
The data on emotional suppression confirms this. Research shows that athletes who suppress emotions -- the “tough it out, show nothing” approach in locker rooms -- produce less power output and report more physical exhaustion than those who acknowledge and regulate through reappraisal or acceptance. Suppression consumes the same executive function resources you need for performance. The stoic founder archetype -- the one who walks into the room projecting unshakable calm while internally fighting their own nervous system -- is not just psychologically costly. It is measurably counterproductive (Dr. Paul McCarthy, 2025).
Clutch is not suppression. It is engagement. It acknowledges the pressure and works with it rather than pretending it does not exist.
Sports Insights for Founders
I suspect the inner life of athletes and entrepreneurs are more similar than different. Here are 5 findings that are directly actionable in your own life. Small and simple shifts in your thought patterns can make a huge difference in your own ability to remain calm and able under pressure.
Reappraise anxiety as excitement
Over 90% of people, when they feel pre-performance anxiety, instinctively try to calm down. This is the inferior strategy. Alison Wood Brooks at Harvard demonstrated that saying “I am excited” -- out loud, literally one sentence -- before a high-stakes performance shifts the cognitive appraisal from threat to opportunity and measurably improves outcomes across singing, public speaking, and math. Anxiety and excitement are physiologically identical -- same heart rate, same cortisol, same sweaty palms. The only difference is the label. Trying to calm down requires a costly downshift in arousal. Relabeling as excitement preserves arousal congruency and redirects it toward approach motivation (Brooks, 2014, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General).
Focus on external cues to get out of your head
A review of approximately 100 studies by Gabriele Wulf found that externally focused attention -- on the effect of the action rather than the mechanics of the body producing it -- consistently produces superior performance across nearly every motor and cognitive task studied. Internal focus (”Am I speaking clearly enough? Am I making eye contact? Is my body language right?”) activates conscious monitoring of automatic processes. External focus (”What is the investor’s key concern? What decision am I driving toward? What does this person need to hear?”) lets the trained system execute while directing conscious resources where they belong (Wulf, 2013).
In the middle of a pitch that matters most, stop auditing your performance. Start tracking the room.
Use strategic distraction before the highest-stakes moment.
This is the hardest one to accept, because it violates everything we have been told about focus and preparation. But Beilock’s research is clear: for experts, a mild cognitive distraction in the moments before execution prevents the conscious mind from hijacking automatic routines. Count backward from seven. Hum a melody. Focus on a single sensory detail in the room -- the temperature of the water glass, the texture of the table.
By doing so, you are protecting your automaticity from your own conscious interference. The founder who walks into the biggest meeting of their career thinking about what they had for breakfast may outperform the one who spent the last twenty minutes in intense mental rehearsal -- because the first founder’s expertise can run without a supervisor.
Talk to yourself in third person.
Research by Ethan Kross and Jason Moser demonstrates that third-person self-talk reduces emotional reactivity within one second, without engaging any additional cognitive control systems. EEG data show a rapid reduction in brain-potential markers of emotional reactivity, and fMRI confirms it happens without increased prefrontal control activity. It produces psychological distance at essentially zero cognitive cost. It is fundamentally different from suppression or forced positive thinking, both of which consume mental resources you need for the task itself (Moser et al., 2017, Scientific Reports).
Write about your worries for ten minutes before you walk in.
Anxious thoughts consume working memory -- the same finite mental workspace that runs your decision-making, your recall, your ability to think on your feet. When the working memory is occupied by suppressed worry (”What if they say no? What if I forget the numbers? What if they see through me?”), there is less bandwidth for the actual task. The expressive writing protocol developed by Ramirez and Beilock is brutally simple: ten minutes, pen and paper, write out every worry. The act of writing externalizes the anxious thoughts, freeing the cognitive bandwidth they were consuming (Ramirez & Beilock, 2011, Science).
Before an important meeting or presentation, find ten minutes and a piece of paper. Write out everything you are afraid will happen. Then fold it, put it in your pocket, and walk in with a working memory free of worry mind chatter.
Handling Pressure is a Skill
“The most exciting part of my work is showing that you can get better at things with practice... The idea that you’re not born a choker or a thriver, that everyone has to practice.” — Sian Beilock
Mental pressure is a stressor on your system - just like heavy weights are stressors for your muscles. With the right dose and approach, that pressure can deliver improvements that lead up to becoming less susceptible to neural collapse in high stakes moments.
“People say to me all the time, ‘You have no fear.’ I tell them, ‘No, that’s not true. I’m scared all the time. You have to have fear in order to have courage.’”
Next time you feel like seizing up, ask yourself what lies on the other side of you fears.