Nice Guys Do NOT Finish Last

Leo Durocher never said "nice guys finish last."

An editor did. And you've been living by it ever since.

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 means to you. And it's important to know that he was also one of the most disliked men in baseball. He got thrown out of a hundred 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'd 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. 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.

Welcome to The Real Jason Duncan Podcast. Every week I write a newsletter called What's Real? where I expose the lies most people believe and reveal the truths they were never taught, and every Wednesday I bring it to you right here.

This week's post is called 'Nice Guys Do NOT Finish Last.'

Let me tell you what happened next.

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 talking 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 all of them, 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. And what was the reason? 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 whole point today. In twenty twelve, a professor at Notre Dame named Timothy Judge and two colleagues looked at income data on about ten thousand workers across twenty years, and they found that men who scored below average on "agreeableness," which is the psychologist's word for being nice, earned about eighteen percent more than men who scored above average. In their sample, that came out to almost ten thousand dollars a year for being a jerk.

So there you have it. Science says nice guys finish last. Or at least ten grand 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. He said, "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 nineteen eighty, 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 fourteen 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, two hundred 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 the entire 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 sixty-three 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. And what he found should have settled this argument about nice guys finishing last forty-five 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 sixty-three entries, fourteen of the top fifteen were nice.

Now, it's 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 think about that list carefully, you'll see that it 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. And 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 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 three thousand years before a computer ever played a game, and he put it in two lines. This is Proverbs chapter three, verses three and four, from the ESV.

"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."

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. That sounds eerily familiar to what Axelrod wrote about, except Solomon wrote it three thousand years earlier.

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 nineteen forty-six, 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.

Everything I just told you about Tit for Tat comes down to one thing. You can't play that strategy if you don't know what the other guy did last time. You have to be able to see it. And that's the reason I want to tell you about the tool I use every week for my follow-up, because they also happen to sponsor this show.

Every follow-up I send after a podcast, a sales conversation, or a speaking inquiry goes out through a tool called Dubb. I record one short video, and Dubb turns it into a personalized video email, a text, or a landing page with a button on it. I've used it since twenty eighteen.

And here's what makes it different from just hitting send and hoping. Dubb tells me who opened it, who watched the video, how far they got before they quit, and what they clicked. So I'm never guessing what the other guy did. I know. And that changes what I do next.

I've known Ruben and Darius, the guys who built it, for years, and they've sponsored this show for a long time. If you want to try it, go to therealjasonduncan.com/dubb and use the promo code T-R-J-D-five-zero at checkout for fifty percent off your first two months. That's therealjasonduncan.com slash D-U-B-B, promo code TRJD50, and the link is in the show notes.

If you want the written version of this every Wednesday morning before the episode drops, it's free. Go to therealjasonduncan.com/articles and subscribe. That's therealjasonduncan.com/articles, and the link is in the show notes.

One more thing before I let you go. I'm booking keynotes for twenty twenty-seven. If you know somebody who puts on a conference or runs an industry group, send them to therealjasonduncan.com/speaking. That's therealjasonduncan.com, slash, S-P-E-A-K-I-N-G, and the link is in the show notes.

If you know a guy who's been told his whole life that he's too nice to get ahead, send him this one.

As always, I am your host, The Real Jason Duncan, and Jesus is King.