It was July 6, 1946, and the Brooklyn Dodgers were getting ready to play the Giants. Their manager, Leo Durocher, who was known for being one of the most colorful managers in baseball at the time, said something that has forever changed the way we all think about “nice guys”, whatever that meant to you. And it's important to know that he was also one of the most disliked men in baseball, and got thrown out of 100 games in his career.
A radio broadcaster named Red Barber was poking at him about his infamous bad attitude and asked him why he couldn't just be a nice guy for once. A sportswriter named Frank Graham was standing right there with them, and according to Graham, Durocher pointed across the field at the Giants coming out of their dugout and said something like this: "Nice guys? Look over there. Do you know a nicer guy than Mel Ott or any of the other Giants? Well, they're the nicest guys in the world, and where are they? In seventh place."
Then he said it again because he realized what he said and he wanted to make a point out of it, “The nice guys are all over there in seventh place.”
Now, seventh place in an eight-team league is bad, but it isn't last. And what Durocher was saying, if you listen to it, was really just a shot at one team on one afternoon. The Giants were nice, and the Giants were losing, and Leo wasn't nice, and Leo was winning. He didn't mean anything more than that.
Graham printed it in the New York Journal-American the next day. And that fall, when Baseball Digest reprinted his column, somebody at the magazine changed one word. "Seventh” place became "last” place. And the phrase we all know was invented right there on the spot as a way to sell more magazines.
One editor, one word, and a sentence that Leo Durocher never said became the most famous thing Leo Durocher ever said: “Nice guys finish last.”
He spent years telling people he'd been misquoted, but it didn't matter. By 1975, when he wrote his autobiography, he gave up and put the misquote on the cover, because by then the lie was more famous than he was.
I bring this up because I've been writing all month about lies that have an author. Somebody made them up, somebody we trust repeated them, and they stuck. And this is one of my favorite examples of the myriad of lies I reveal in this blog, because the man everybody credits with it was talking about baseball standings, and the guy who actually wrote the lie was an editor nobody remembers, trying to spice up a headline just to sell more magazines.
But the lie stuck for a reason. “What was the reason?” you may ask. I think it stuck because a whole lot of people wanted it to be true.
You've watched the loud guy get promoted. You've watched the jerk in the sales meeting get the big account, and you've sat there and thought, well, I guess that's just how it works. Nice guys finish last. And if you're a person of faith like me, you've probably felt a little bit of a tug between what you believe about how to treat people and what you think it takes to get ahead. Admittedly, this is something I've struggled with my entire life.
Before I get too deep into this, I want to share with you the results of a study that may seem to contradict my point in today's article. In 2012, a professor at Notre Dame named Timothy Judge and two colleagues looked at income data on about 10,000 workers across 20 years, and they found that men who scored below average on "agreeableness" – which is the psychologist's word for being nice – earned about 18% more than men who scored above average. In their sample, that came out to almost $10,000 a year for being a jerk.
So there you have it. Science says nice guys finish last. (Or at least $10k behind the other guys.)
Well, not so fast. Because the same study found something else and the news stories left it out. The so-called “agreeable” people had stronger friendships, more involvement in their communities, less stress, and higher life satisfaction. The authors' own conclusion was that if disagreeable men win the earnings war, it's a victory that may come at some cost. And Judge himself, when a reporter asked him about it, said something really important: "There's a difference between disagreeing and being disagreeable."
Hold onto that, because I'm coming back to it.
I call what happened to Leo Durocher's sentence the Pushover Swap, and here's what I mean by that.
The phrase "nice guys finish last" only works if you swap out the word "nice" for the word "pushover". Nobody actually believes that a kind, generous man who keeps his word and can't be bullied is going to finish last. What they believe is that a man who can be bullied is going to finish last. And that's true! But getting bullied has nothing to do with being nice. It just means you're weak. Somewhere along the way we let those two words become the same word, and the swap is what makes the lie sound like truth.
Now let me show you what actually happens when you test it.
Back in 1980, a political scientist at the University of Michigan named Robert Axelrod got curious about a question that sounds simple: in a world where you're going to deal with the same people over and over, does it pay to be nice or to be ruthless? So he set up a tournament. He invited 14 game theorists, economists, and mathematicians to each write a computer program that would play a game called the Prisoner's Dilemma against every other program, 200 rounds at a time.
The rules of the game are easy. On every round you either cooperate with the other guy or you stab him in the back. If you both cooperate, you both do okay. If you stab him and he cooperates, you do great and he gets nothing. If you both stab, you both do badly. Then the next round starts, and you both remember what happened.
Smart people submitted some very clever programs. Some were sneaky. Some tried to figure out the other guy's pattern and exploit it. And the winner was the shortest program in the tournament, a few lines of code, submitted by a psychologist named Anatol Rapoport. It was called Tit for Tat, and here's what his code deployed as a strategy: cooperate on the first move, and after that, do whatever the other guy did last time.
In other words, be nice first. If he's nice back, keep being nice forever. If he stabs you, stab him right back, once. And the second he goes back to cooperating, so do you.
Axelrod ran a second tournament, and this time he told everybody up front which strategy had won the first one. This second tournament had 63 entries, all of them trying to beat Tit for Tat, but guess what? Tit for Tat won again.
Then Axelrod went back through both tournaments to figure out why Tit for Tat kept winning. What he found should have settled this argument about nice guys finishing last 45 years ago. He sorted every program into two piles. The "nice" programs were the ones that would never stab the other guy first. The "not-nice" programs were the ones that would. In the first tournament, the top eight programs were all in the nice pile. Every one of them. The not-nice programs, the sneaky ones that tried to exploit everybody else, finished behind every nice program in the field. And in the second tournament, with 63 entries, 14 of the top 15 were nice.
It is important to note that Axelrod was careful to say what "nice" meant, and it's not what Durocher's editor meant. The winning strategy had five traits.
- First, it was nice, meaning it never struck first.
- Second, it was provocable, meaning it hit back immediately when it got hit.
- Third, it was forgiving, meaning it didn't hold a grudge once the other guy straightened up.
- Fourth, it was non-envious, meaning it didn't care about beating the other guy, only about doing well.
- And fifth, it was clear, so people could tell what it was going to do.
If you analyze that list carefully, you will see that this doesn't describe a “pushover”. It can describe a “nice” person, but it certainly doesn't describe a “pushover”. It describes a man who treats you well until you give him a reason not to, who will absolutely make you pay for crossing him, and who will let it go the minute you make it right. I've known men like that, and I bet you have too, and they do not “finish last”.
Now you can see the golden cage here, right? Being “hard” looks like strength, and every so often it even works. In a single negotiation with somebody you'll never see again, the jerk sometimes does win, and Judge's study revealed that as true. So when you decide that nice guys finish last, it feels like you finally understand how the world really works.
What traps you is that most of your most important negotiations in life are not isolated single negotiations. Your marriage isn't. Your kids aren't. Your church, your company, the guys you do business with across town, the vendor you're going to need a favor from in three years, none of them are. Those are people you're going to have to deal with over and over, and every one of them will remember what you did last time.
And in that kind of game, the guy who strikes first loses to the guy who strikes back. Almost every time.
Leo Durocher was talking about one team on one afternoon. His guys were in first place, the Giants were in seventh, and that's all he meant by it. He never intended it as a law for every person in every place for all time. (For what it's worth, the Giants won the pennant five years later, and the man managing them was Leo Durocher.)
So how do you break free from the cage of this lie that tells you that nice guys finish last? You quit confusing nice with weak, and you start being the kind of nice that can't be pushed around.
Solomon had this figured out about 3,000 years before a computer ever played a game, and he put it in two lines.
"Let not steadfast love and faithfulness forsake you; bind them around your neck; write them on the tablet of your heart. So you will find favor and good success in the sight of God and man." (Proverbs 3:3-4, ESV)
I want you to notice a couple of things. First, look at what he tells you to hang onto. “Steadfast love and faithfulness.” He doesn't say niceness, and he doesn't say being agreeable. Steadfast love is the kind that doesn't move when somebody pushes on it, and faithfulness is keeping your word whether or not the other guy keeps his. This sounds eerily familiar to what Axelrod wrote about, but Solomon wrote it 3,000 years before.
Second, look at what he says you'll get for it. “Favor and good success.” In the sight of God and in the sight of man. Solomon isn't promising you a reward in the next life for being a doormat in this one. He's telling you that steadfast love and faithfulness, held onto so tightly you tie them around your neck, get you good success with people, right here right now, because people can tell the difference between a man who's “kind” and a man who's “soft”. They trust the first one, and they use the second one.
That's the difference Durocher's editor deleted with one word in 1946, and we've been living inside the misquote ever since.
Nice guys don't finish last. Pushovers finish last, and so do jerks, eventually, because the tournament never ends and everybody remembers. The guys who finish first are the ones who are kind first, hit back when they have to, and forgive the second it's over.
Be that guy, and quit apologizing for it.
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