Wallenda Effect

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What is the Wallenda Effect?

The Wallenda Effect is a practiced act getting worse when attention leaves the act and settles on not failing.

Life is being on the wire, everything else is just waiting.

That sentence is the history page of The Flying Wallendas, archived 1 November 2010, reporting what Karl once said. Warren Bennis, on page 22 of Why Leaders Can’t Lead (Jossey-Bass, 1990), reports a close line. For Wallenda, living was walking the tightrope, and everything else was waiting. The two wordings are not one sentence. Neither is a timed transcript. The effect on this page is the loss of that stay-on-the-act attention. Bennis calls the faculty itself the Wallenda Factor. He writes that leaders in his group seemed unacquainted with failure as a concept. What another person might call a failure, they called a mistake, an error, a false start, or another way of doing things. This page does not rotate his factor into a second title. Wallenda Effect means the practiced act getting worse once attention has settled on not failing. White Bear Effect is a different instruction. There, a person tries not to think of a named image, and the image returns. Here, the report is that attention was on falling, instead of on the walk. Trying not to picture a fall, and concentrating on the fall, can sit in one afternoon. They are still two rows. Focusing Illusion is a third row: one feature is given too much weight when a person judges a life. It is not the step-by-step of a skill that already runs.

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Wallenda Effect in 3 Depths

• Beginner: If the sentence in your head is “do not miss,” write the next visible motion on the page. The motion is the cue. The score you fear is not the cue.
• Practitioner: Before a talk, a match, or a tested task you can already do, put two lines on one card. Line one is the result you are trying not to lose. Line two is the next checkable motion. Do line two. Leave line one on the card so you can see that it was not the motion.
• Advanced: A real hazard, an unready skill, and a practiced skill are three rows. Wind and a loose rope are checks. A beginner may still need the steps. The lab sentence below is about a skill that can already run without listing those steps. One sentence that merges the three rows drops the distinction this page is for.

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Origin

The name on this page comes from Warren Bennis’s Wallenda Factor, the faculty of staying on the task. The book in hand is Why Leaders Can’t Lead: The Unconscious Conspiracy Continues (Jossey-Bass, 1990), page 22. The copyright line is 1989. Later summaries also place the name in Leaders: Strategies for Taking Charge (Harper & Row, 1985). That book was not opened. No sentence from it is on this page. Karl Wallenda was born in Magdeburg, Germany, in 1905. The family history page says so, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry “Karl Wallenda” says so. Neither of those two prints the day of the month. He died on 22 March 1978 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Gregory Jaynes, in The New York Times of 23 March 1978, calls him 73. Britannica gives the same date, the same city, and the same age. On page 22 Bennis says that in the early 1970s, seventy-one-year-old Karl Wallenda said that for him living was walking the tightrope, and everything else was waiting. He says that several months later Wallenda fell to his death in San Juan, still clutching the balancing pole, while walking a tightrope without a safety net between two high-rise buildings. A birth in 1905 does not make him 71 in the early 1970s. The Times calls him 73 on 22 March 1978. Several months after the early 1970s is not that date. The book’s clock is not the timeline of the fall. The pole, the net, and the words “high-rise” are Bennis’s telling. They are not in the Times paragraphs used here. What Bennis reports from the wife is the attention claim. He writes that before the fall, for the first time since she had known him, Wallenda had been concentrating on falling, instead of on walking the tightrope. He had personally supervised the attachment of the guide wires, which he had never done before. Bennis does not print her given name on that page. The family history page says a teenage aerialist, Helen Kreis, later became his wife. That page does not print the attention sentence. Do not merge the two into one quotation. The Chinese alias is older than the fall, and it is about a different object. Chinese Wikisource, 論語, 陽貨第十七, passage 十七之十五, prints a saying of Confucius. A base person is no partner in serving a ruler. Before he has the post, he worries about getting it. Once he has it, he worries about losing it. If he worries about losing it, there is nothing he will not do. The popular label compresses the getting and the losing. It is a warning about office and conduct. It is not a measured drop in a practiced act, and it is not Bennis’s page. The lab neighbor is an abstract, not the origin of the name. Sian L. Beilock and Thomas H. Carr, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 130(4), December 2001, pages 701–725, DOI 10.1037/0096-3445.130.4.701. The PDF was not read. The PubMed abstract says experiments 1 and 2 looked at generic knowledge and at episodic memories of putting, in novice and expert golfers. Impoverished episodic recollection of specific putts among experts indicated that skilled putting is encoded in a procedural form. That form supports performance without step-by-step attentional control. Explicit monitoring theories say that this proceduralization makes putting vulnerable under pressure. “Procedural” here means stored as a practiced sequence. “Explicit monitoring” means watching those steps while the sequence runs. Experiments 3 and 4, on the abstract, found choking in putting and not in a nonproceduralized alphabet-arithmetic skill, a letter-and-number task like mental arithmetic. In putting, choking was unchanged by dual-task training and eliminated by self-consciousness training. The abstract does not print a distance, a sample size, or the training procedure. None of those is on this page.

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Key Points

Four lines keep the faculty, the three accounts of one fall, the lab split, and the real hazard from collapsing into one slogan.

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Applications

Use the name to separate the next motion, the result you fear losing, and a hazard you can check. The split is a performance habit. It is also a limit on what the 1978 fall can explain.

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Case Study

On 22 March 1978, in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Karl Wallenda tried to walk a cable between the Condado Holiday Inn and the Flamboyan Hotel. Gregory Jaynes, in The New York Times of 23 March 1978, says the walk was to promote the Pan American Circus, in which Wallenda and his granddaughter Rietta, 17, were performing nightly on a wire 50 feet high. The Times calls him 73, the founder of the Great Wallendas. Several hundred spectators watched. Wind gusts apparently caused him to lose his balance. He grasped for the wire, then fell 100 feet, landing on a taxicab and bouncing to the pavement. The cable is described as 750 feet long, strung between the beachfront hotels. Those two lengths are not one length. One is the fall. One is the cable. Bill Carpenter, promotion manager of the Pan American Circus, told the Times that Wallenda had checked the wire and the wind several times. The wind was 12 miles an hour from the east, with gusts much higher. Carpenter had asked whether he wanted to go on in such a strong wind. Wallenda replied: “Don’t worry about it. The wind is stronger on the street than up there.” At Presbyterian Hospital, the death was attributed to multiple fractures and traumas. The Encyclopaedia Britannica entry gives a third length. It says he died in a fall from a wind-whipped wire stretched 123 feet (37 metres) above the pavement, between two hotels in San Juan. That figure is a height of the wire. It is not the Times’s 100-foot fall, and it is not the 750-foot cable. This page does not average them. The family history page, archived 1 November 2010, agrees on the month, the year, the city, and the age: a promotional walk in San Juan in March 1978, death at 73. It then names a different cause. Not his age or his capabilities, and not the wind, but several misconnected guy ropes along the wire. Bennis, on the page already cited, does not mention Carpenter, the 12 miles an hour, the taxicab, or misconnected ropes. He writes that the wife said Wallenda had been concentrating on falling instead of on walking the tightrope, and that he had personally supervised the guide wires for the first time. He also writes a clock, early 1970s and several months later, that does not match a 1905 birth and a death on 22 March 1978. The question people bring to the name is which sentence caused the fall. The sources used here do not share an answer. The same-day paper names the wind and prints his reply that the wind was stronger on the street. The family page names the ropes and sets the wind aside. Bennis names a shift of attention and a new supervision of the wires. A reader can hold all three. A reader cannot, from these pages, pick one and call it measured. The lesson is the split, not a rate. The Wallenda Effect, as this page uses it, is the attention report: concentration on falling instead of on the walk. That report is Bennis’s account of what the wife said. It is not the Times’s cause, and it is not the family page’s cause. Self-Fulfilling Prophecy is a false definition that helps produce the fact it named. These three accounts do not show that his attention produced the fall. They show that the name traveled through an anecdote the news did not use as its cause. The lengths stay on this walk. Do not export 100 feet, 750 feet, 123 feet, 37 metres, 50 feet, 12 miles an hour, age 73, or Rietta’s age of 17 onto a meeting, an exam, a match, or another year. Do not subtract 123 from 100. Do not call the morning reply a proof that he was calm, or a proof that the wind was mild. Gusts much higher than 12 miles an hour are in the same paragraph.

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Boundaries and Failure Modes

The name does not travel as a cause of the fall, and it does not replace a check of the wire. Three accounts are the boundary. If a later page needs one cause, it has left this one. The lab boundary is the unread PDF and the split inside the abstract. Choking, on that abstract, showed up in proceduralized putting and not in alphabet arithmetic. A skill you cannot yet run without the steps is the wrong row for a warning against watching the steps. Yerkes-Dodson Law is a different account, about how much arousal sits on a performance. This page does not restate that curve, and it does not borrow that page’s claims. High arousal and attention on not failing can occur together. They are not one mechanism because both can spoil an afternoon. The Analects sentence is a second boundary. Worry about getting a post, and then about losing it, until nothing is forbidden, is a claim about conduct in office. It can be worth heeding. It is not a golf result, and it is not a wire. Using 患得患失心理 as a synonym for every ordinary worry, including a checked hazard and an unready skill, empties the name. The common misuse runs in two directions. One direction treats the death as proof that a thought of falling kills. The paper and the family page give other causes, and they disagree with each other. The other direction treats “do not think about failure” as a complete method. Bennis’s leaders still had mistakes. They refused the word failure. That refusal is not a reason to skip the wind or the ropes.

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Common Misconceptions

Three swaps turn one anecdote, one old sentence about office, and one unread putting paper into a rule for every nervous hour.

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Related Concepts

These pages sit next to the Wallenda Effect. None of them is a second name for a practiced act losing its attention to the act.

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One-Line Takeaway