The winner’s wisdom of Silicon Valley Stoics

Letting go of comfort and control makes sense — if you already have those things writes Janan Ganesh in The FT.


 The late George Michael used to hail marijuana as the optimal drug — for those who have already achieved their ambitions. For the rest of us, he warned, its mellowing properties would sap our drive. “You’ve got to be in the right position in life,” said a man who kept houses in both Hampstead and Highgate, which, if you know Manhattan better, is like keeping homes on East 75th Street and West 75th Street.  

An idea that works for an established winner can be utterly ruinous for a mere aspirant. 

 For some reason, this insight comes to mind whenever I encounter the modern fad for Stoicism. Which, given that I have access to the internet, and to the state of California, is rather a lot. 

In common parlance, Stoicism used to mean nothing more specific than a kind of grin-and-bear-it fortitude. But in recent years, the actual philosophy of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius has rallied too, if in glib and half-understood form. 

The new Stoicism calls for — and here I paraphrase — a virtuous rather than joy-centred life. It often takes the guise of self-denial: the modern Stoic volunteers for ice baths and sparse diets. It also manifests as a certain detachment from the vicissitudes of life. The modern Stoic does not rail against external variables. Enemies, disasters and random surprises are all part of the natural order. 

You can recognise the parallels with the Zen vogue of yesteryear. And you can guess who has fallen hardest for this creed. It has made deep inroads into the educated rich, and into the tech cognoscenti in particular. Through their cultural reach — the podcasts, the Ted talks — it is fanning out from Silicon Valley to other pockets of well-fed ennui. 

There is a something to be said for this elevated version of self-help. Certain habits I keep, such as a minimal intake of media, are unconsciously neo-Stoic. And while some of its followers would fall for any passing -ism or -ology (Tim Ferriss, Arianna Huffington), others have brains like industrial lasers. 

All the more reason, then, for the smarter among them to insert a qualifier: letting go of comfort and control makes perfect sense (and I really must resort to italics here) once you already have these things. The new Stoicism is a kind of victor’s wisdom. It simplifies the lives of people who are beset with extreme surplus. This is not a universal problem. Modern Stoics should not pretend to universal (or even broad) relevance. “Very little is needed to make a happy life”, wrote Marcus Aurelius, the ultimate owner of everything in the known world at the time. At least he did not try this line on the masses. His Meditations were never meant for publication. Would that his 21st-century heirs were so coy. 

As a way of de-stressing powerful millionaires, neo-Stoic thought is hard to fault. For those striving for some power and millions to be stressed about, it rather speaks over their heads. Most of us aspire to material comforts or (another Stoic no-no) popularity. It is fine to achieve these things and then decide to keep them in check, lest they drive one mad. But to warn others off them, or pretend they can get them by not craving them, is life advice at its most de haut en bas. 

 You will notice that the smarmy de-emphasis on earthly pleasures stops well short of total renunciation. Like some credulous Sloane on an equatorial gap year, the modern Stoic idealises hardship precisely because they can pick and choose their exposure to it. “Practising poverty,” they call it, with Marie Antoinette’s self-awareness. 

Perhaps the worst of it is the deception of those who are just starting out in life. Unless “22 Stoic Truth-Bombs From Marcus Aurelius That Will Make You Unf***withable” is pitched at retirees, the internet crawls with bad Stoic advice for the young. The premise is that what answers to the needs of those in the 99th percentile of wealth and power is at all relevant to those trying to break out of, say, the 50th. The new Stoicism is not useless. It promises a measure of serenity in a world that militates against it. You’ve just got to be in the right position in life.

The secret joys of schadenfreude

Tiffany Watt Smith in The Guardian

Recently I went to my corner shop to buy some milk. I found myself pausing by the celebrity gossip magazines. My first instinct, just in case someone was listening in on my thoughts, was to think: “Ugh, who buys these terrible magazines?” Then I picked one up. There was the cellulite, the weight gained and lost, the bingo wings circled in red. My favourite story was an interview with a pop star, or perhaps a model, who lived in a luxury mansion. I’m the sort of person who usually curdles with envy on hearing about someone’s luxury mansion. But this was different. The story was about how she was lonely. Tragically lonely following a break-up.

I looked about and took the magazine to the till. There was a warm sensation working its way across my chest. I felt lucky. No, that’s not it. I felt smug. This is a confession. I love daytime TV. I smoke, even though I officially gave up years ago. I’m often late, and usually lie about why. And sometimes I feel good when others feel bad.

The Japanese have a saying: “The misfortune of others tastes like honey.” The French speak of joie maligne, a diabolical delight in other people’s suffering. In Danish it is skadefryd; in Hebrew, simcha la-ed; in Mandarin, xìng-zāi-lè-huò; in Russian, zloradstvo; and for the Melanesians who live on the remote Nissan Atoll in Papua New Guinea, it is banbanam. Two millennia ago, the Romans spoke of malevolentia. Earlier still, the Greeks described epichairekakia (literally epi, over, chairo, rejoice, kakia, disgrace). A study in Würzburg in Germany carried out in 2015 found that football fans smiled more quickly and broadly when their rival team missed a penalty, than when their own team scored. “To see others suffer does one good,” wrote the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. “This is a hard saying, but a mighty, human, all-too-human principle.”

There has never really been a word for these grubby delights in English. In the 1500s, someone attempted to introduce “epicaricacy” from the ancient Greek, but it didn’t catch on. There could only be one conclusion: as a journalist in the Spectator asserted in 1926, “There is no English word for schadenfreude because there is no such feeling here.” He was wrong, of course.

‘It’s part of many of our cherished communal rituals, from sports to gossip’: model Siobhan at Hired Hands; make-up Grace Ellington; nails Naima Coleman. Photograph: Ilka and Franz for the Observer

I’m British, and enjoying other people’s mishaps and misery feels as much part of my culture as teabags and talking about the weather. “For what do we live but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?” proclaims Mr Bennet in that most quintessentially English of novels, Pride and Prejudice. Nothing unites us more strongly in self-righteous joy than an MP caught cooking the books. We’re even not averse to schadenfreude at our own expense: as George Orwell once remarked, the English are unique for celebrating not military triumphs, but disasters (“Into the valley of death rode the 600...”).

We know how to enjoy failures. But ask us to name this enjoyment, and our language falls into a hypocritical silence. It averts its gaze and squirms. And so we adopted the German word. From schaden, meaning damage or harm, and freude, meaning joy or pleasure: damage-joy.

No one likes to think about their flaws, but in them so much of what makes us human is revealed. Enjoying other people’s misfortunes might sound simple – a mere glint of malice, a flick of spite. But look closer and you’ll glimpse some of the most hidden yet important parts of our lives.

When I pay attention to the pleasures I might feel in others’ disasters, I am struck by the variety of tastes and textures involved. There is the glee at incompetence – not just of skiers faceplanting in the snow, but at screw-ups of implausible magnitude: when Nasa lost a $125m Mars orbiter because half the team were using imperial measurements and the other, metric. Then there is the self-righteous satisfaction I get when hypocrites are exposed: a politician accidentally tweets a picture of his erection (he meant to send it directly to his intern). And of course, there is the inner triumph of seeing a rival falter. The other day, in the coffee shop, a colleague asked if I’d got the promotion I’d gone for. No, I said. And I noticed, at the corner of his mouth, the barely perceptible twitch of a grin before the tumble of commiserations. Oh bad luck. Ah, their loss, the idiots. And I was tempted to ask: “Did you just smile?” But I didn’t. Because when he loses out – as he sometimes does – I know I experience a happy twinge, too.

Sometimes it is easy to share our delight, reposting memes of a disgraced politician’s resignation speech. Far harder to acknowledge are those spasms of relief which accompany the bad news of our successful friends and relatives. They come involuntarily, these confusing bursts of pleasure, swirled through with shame. And they worry us – not just because we fear that our lack of compassion says something terrible about us – because they point so clearly to our envy and inferiority, and how we clutch at the disappointments of others in order to feel better about our own.

When my brother took his kids on a fabulous summer holiday to America, I felt bad because I never take my kids anywhere since it’s too much effort and too expensive. And then I saw his Facebook status: it rained.

  Whoops! Careful you don’t slip up. Photograph: Ilka & Franz for the Observer

Today schadenfreude is all around us. It’s there in the way we do politics, how we treat celebrities, in online fail videos. But these heady pleasures are shot through with unease. Moralists have long despised schadenfreude. The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer called it “an infallible sign of a thoroughly bad heart and profound moral worthlessness”, the worst trait in human nature. (He also said that anyone caught enjoying the suffering of others should be shunned from human society. Which made me sweat a bit.)

I have come to believe that Schopenhauer was wrong. When the word schadenfreude first appeared in English writing in 1853, it caused great excitement. This was probably not the intention of RC Trench, the archbishop of Dublin, who first mentioned it in On the Study of Words. For Trench, the mere existence of the word was unholy and fearful, a “mournful record of the strange wickednesses which the genius of man has invented”.

His fellow Victorians adopted the word for a range of pleasures, from hilarity to self-righteous vindication, from triumph to relief. In the 1890s, animal-rights campaigner Frances Power Cobbe wrote a manifesto entitled Schadenfreude, identifying the emotion with the bloodlust of boys torturing stray cats for fun.

We still associate many different pleasures with this word, unclear perhaps exactly what it means in the original, or where its perimeters lie. But looking at how the word has been used in English it is possible to identify repeated themes. Schadenfreude is usually thought of as a spectator sport – opportunistically enjoying someone’s misfortune rather than gloating at pain you’ve caused yourself. We usually think of it as a furtive emotion, and no wonder. We might be worried not just about looking malicious, but that our schadenfreude exposes our other flaws, too – our pettiness, our envy, our feelings of inadequacy.

Another feature of schadenfreude is that we often feel entitled to it when the suffering can be construed as a comeuppance – a deserved punishment for being smug or hypocritical, or breaking the law. So we relish our moral superiority (usually only at a safe distance). In 2015, US pastor Tony Perkins said that floods were sent by God to punish abortion and gay marriage. And then his own house flooded and he had to escape in a canoe. Even the ever-impartial BBC enjoyed this story, posing aerial pictures of the flooded house next to his controversial “God is trying to send us a message” interview.

Schadenfreude is usually thought of as glee at discomforts and gaffes rather than at tragedies and deaths. But this rule isn’t hard and fast, and context matters. We are willing to see celebrities, or people from the remote past, endure horrors that would dismay us if they were happening now or to our friends. All emotions are what psychologists call “cognitive” – in other words, not simply reflex reactions to external triggers, but complex processes requiring us to appraise and judge our relationship with the world around us and tailor our responses accordingly.

Sometimes we judge wrongly, and our schadenfreude leaves us feeling morally awkward. There is an episode of The Simpsons in which Homer’s infuriatingly perfect neighbour Ned Flanders opens a shop, The Leftorium. Given the chance to imagine three wishes, Homer fantasises that Ned’s business collapses. First, he sees the shop empty of customers, then Flanders turning out his pockets, then Flanders begging the bailiffs. It is only when Homer imagines Flanders’s grave, Flanders’s children weeping beside it, that he stops himself. “Too far,” he says, and quickly rewinds to the image of the bankrupt shop.

These questions about how and why we enjoy the pain of others – what is acceptable, what is “too far” – have featured in some of the greatest works of philosophy and literature for over 2,000 years. But arguably the urgency to understand schadenfreude has never been so great as today.

In December 2008, a reader of the New York Times lamented that we are living in a “golden age of schadenfreude”. Similar phrases have appeared since on blogs and in op-eds. Truthfully, we can’t ever know whether we are actually experiencing more schadenfreude than before. It certainly seems a more obvious feature of our collective lives, since what used to be hidden or else communicated in fleeting sniggers by the water cooler is now preserved forever in “likes” and “shares” in the digital aspic.

There has been an explosion of research. Before 2000, barely any academic articles were published with the word “schadenfreude” in the title. Now even a cursory search throws up hundreds, from neuroscience to philosophy to management studies. What is driving all this interest? No doubt it is partly motivated by our attempts to understand life in the internet age, where sniggering at other people, once often socially inappropriate, now comes with less risk. Just as important, in my view, is our growing commitment to empathy. The capacity to attune ourselves to other people’s suffering is highly prized today – and rightly so. Putting ourselves in another’s shoes impacts on our ability to lead others, to parent, to be a decent partner and friend. And the more important empathy becomes, the more obnoxious schadenfreude seems.

It is not just Victorian moralists who recoil from it. Today’s humanists find it awkward, too. Schadenfreude has been called “empathy’s shadow”, casting the two as fundamentally incompatible. Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen has pointed out that psychopaths are not only detached from other people’s suffering but even enjoy it: “The Germans have a word for this,” writes Baron-Cohen. With all this swirling around, it’s little wonder that even when schadenfreude feels right, it also feels very wrong.

Yet schadenfreude has its benefits – a quick win which alleviates inferiority or envy; a way of bonding over the failure of a smug colleague. But it is also a testament to our capacity for emotional flexibility, our ability to hold apparently contradictory thoughts and feelings in mind simultaneously. Dostoyevsky knew that schadenfreude and sympathy are not either/or responses, but can be felt all at once. When, in Crime and Punishment, Marmeladov is brought, bloodied and unconscious, into the St Petersburg tenement where he lives following an accident, all the residents crowd round. They experience, wrote Dostoyevsky, “that strange sense of inner satisfaction that always manifests itself, even among the victim’s nearest and dearest, when someone is afflicted by a sudden catastrophe; a sensation that not a single one of us is proof against, however sincere our feelings of pity and sympathy”.

We may well be living in an age of schadenfreude, and fear that this emotion is leading us astray. But as with all emotions, condemning it only gets you so far. What we really need is to think afresh about the work this much-maligned emotion does for us, and what it tells us about our relationships with ourselves and each other.

Schadenfreude may appear antisocial. Yet it is a feature of many of our most cherished communal rituals, from sports to gossip. It may seem misanthropic, yet it is enmeshed in so much of what is distinctly human about how we live: the instinct for justice and fairness; a need for hierarchies and the quest for status within them; the desire to belong to and protect the groups that keep us safe. It may seem superior and demeaning, yet it also speaks of our need to appreciate the absurdity of our attempts to appear in control in a world forever slipping out of our grasp. It might seem isolating and divisive, but it testifies to our need to not feel alone in our disappointments, but to seek the consolations of being part of a community of the failed.

Schadenfreude, exquisite and utterly shabby, is a flaw. But it is a flaw we must all face up to if we truly want to understand life in the modern world.

How I broke my game and then fixed it again

When your feet and hands talk to each other, the runs start to flow © Getty Images

I recently stumbled upon a short but wonderful five-minute video on a camouflaging octopus. Its climax featured it changing its colour and texture to make it look like the surrounding coral.

It provoked thoughts about my own evolution and the impact our environment has on our behaviours. Slowly I started to piece the narrative of my cricket growth together. More specifically, how my own batting had changed and shifted, sometimes subconsciously, other times deliberately, to adapt to various conditions around the country and the world. I realised that what I occasionally thought was right was, in fact, inhibiting my game. Imagine the octopus camouflaged as coral in the middle of the Sahara.

Growing up, I had always tapped my bat in a relaxed and rhythmic manner at the crease. My batting was natural and flowing, and though I had no knowledge of its benefits, my "technique" allowed me to score freely around the ground. Of course I still had deficiencies - some days it felt like I had magnets in my front pad and the ball was made of iron - but I was learning about the game. I enjoyed the feeling of being able to hit the ball where I wanted by simply picking up my bat, moving my foot to where I thought it was going to bounce and swinging. If I wanted to hit the ball a fraction later, on top of the bounce, my hands would allow for a change in bat speed, as they were moving as required and in sync with my feet.

I enjoyed being an aggressive opening batsman with a good defence. I got caught at long-on too often off the spinners in the exuberance of youth, but it always felt like my risk-taking was calculated. My batting lacked consistency, but when it was on, it was on. I thought I understood my game, my limitations, but in hindsight I understood the feeling of rhythmical batting and that the hunger to score runs relied on a clear mind and the reliance on a manageable routine. That was about it. I played the game generally with a smile - scoring runs is fun after all. Writing about it now makes it sound like it was too good to be true.

The first significant evolution came when I entered professional cricket at 21. I had always played the pull shot, but I quickly realised playing the short ball at 140kph was a different proposition. Ducking and weaving became my modus operandi. In the modern era, no one escapes trial by video, and word spread to not let the kid drive. "Push him back, he won't hurt you unless you feed the cut." Run-scoring slowed and my ribs were generally bruised.

	I loved the challenge of opening the batting, but my enjoyment of my own batting started to wane. I found it hard to appreciate the days I did score runs. I always felt like the handbrake was on

The following pre-season, I vowed to stay one step ahead of the opposition by finding my pull shot afresh: if played efficiently and selectively, it would force the bowlers to pitch it up and allow me to play my favoured drives. For months I practised facing tennis balls out of a bowling machine at abnormally fast speeds. I found by holding my bat off the ground, as high as the top of my pad, I got a little head start. Time I thought, was what I needed.

The second ball of the season was a bouncer from Andy Bichel, and out of pure instinct I pulled it over square leg. I could see a look of bemusement in his eye as he growled an expletive. With this slight camouflage I had adapted to my new professional environment. Not to say it was perfect. Some days my hands would drift from my back hip and I would slice across the ball, but I told myself you have to give something to get something, and it generally felt like the trade-off had been a fair one.

The second major adaptation in my technique came after spending 12 months in Tasmania. Our home wicket was a seaming monster and driving on it a very risky proposition. Fielders would be loaded behind the wicket, licking their lips, ready to lap up any half-mistake. Batting was hard work but I loved it. You had to grind, play the ball late and cautiously, and be prepared to be in at tea to get a big first-innings score.

With a big red cross against the drive, I started to hold my bat up higher off the ground, like a baseballer at the mound in what proved a highly effective position to cut and pull. It was also a great position to just drop the bat into the line of the ball for a forward defence. The bat would generally come down at one pace. It was certainly repeatable and it felt little could go wrong. It took the variation out of batting. Risk-free almost, but with no risk comes little reward. Ironically, due to the plane of the swing, it also helped my one-day cricket "slog" over cow corner, and with the emergence of the BBL, it felt like a decent technique to apply across formats.

I would hide the deficiency of not being able to drive with any power by practising with a sawed-off bat, ensuring I got low into my drives to compensate for not having a swing at the ball, as well as having an overly wide stance. My footwork relied on a heavy forward commitment that was the only way to create any power down the ground. If in sync it still felt good, but flowing batting was rarely the order of the day. I was hard to get out but rarely dominant. Batting had become mechanical and success relied on the mental strength of resistance: defend, don't get out for long enough and you will walk off with some well-grafted runs. I had found a method that generally worked in my environment and I was going to stick to it.

The first person who alerted me to the dangers of my new technique was Greg Chappell - a natural maestro and modern great of the game. You would think he had decent credentials for me to value his opinion and perhaps heed his advice. I politely declined. I had just scored my first hundred for Australia A and was feeling pretty good about my game. I would prove him wrong, I thought. Despite my bubble being limited, it was comfortably consistent. I kept telling myself, "It's not how but how many." Looking back, I was being stubborn, as though it was just another hurdle to overcome, another challenge to rise to.

	Cowan and Warner's partnership was based on Warner's ability to attack effectively and Cowan's ability to not get out too cheaply © BCCI  Enlarge

The height of my bat admittedly fluctuated depending on whom I was playing and where and how I was feeling, but slowly and surely I started to resemble a caricature of myself. My stance got wider, my hands slowly slipping further ahead of my back hip. As a job, I loved the challenge of opening the batting, but my enjoyment of my own batting started to wane. I found it hard to appreciate the days I did score runs. I always felt like the handbrake was on. I struggled to watch footage of myself. I wanted to change, but it is either a courageous or incredibly stupid man who would do this in the middle of a series or season. The stakes had become too high.

By this stage, I was acting it all out on the brightly lit stage of international cricket. The game at this level felt largely mental. I knew my limitations and I was prepared to not swim outside the flags, so to speak. I found myself exhausted by the time I had ground my way to 30 or so, and would eventually get out having put little pressure on the bowler. My opening partnership success with David Warner was forged on his innate ability to smack it around and my ability to not get out too cheaply more often than not. I was a ball de-shiner. Or so it felt. His tank was full of premium unleaded to my diesel. Some days we got there just the same, but he would often roar like an F1 to my farm tractor.

An Australian legend of a different kind was the next to try and help, offering the advice that I would find freedom if I narrowed my stance and tapped my bat. This time it was coming from a friend. Justin Langer's words, unlike Chappell's, felt fatherly. He had spent hours with me honing my game and was invested. I went out and batted for him every time I crossed the rope. He mentioned it once in the West Indies during a rain break, but he also knew of the difficulties of changing the recipe on demand. He mentioned it again last season as it became more and more clear that my camouflage had worn off and I was a sitting duck to the predatory bowlers around the country.

And so to the present and the latest adaptation: the winter of 2014 saw my first "off season" in three years. Finally an opportunity to not just fine-tune but rebuild the car from scratch. The game as a travelling professional is now a 12-month gig, which in itself has its drawbacks when you're trying to make improvements to your game. It only feels like you are picking up little gains, and directing more attention towards competing week in, week out. There is little time to step back, take stock and go about putting the parts backs together.

I set about finding my 20-year-old self who had made the game so simple. I started to tap the bat and pick it up only when it was required. Within ten minutes I felt like a bird released from its cage. The ball started to fly purely off the face of the willow as it is meant to - with little effort and an ease that only comes when your feet and hands are talking to each other like loving siblings. That is not to say this guarantees more runs, but I feel like at least I am giving myself the best chance.

	I set about finding my 20-year-old self who had made the game so simple. I started to tap the bat and pick it up only when it was required. Within ten minutes I felt like a bird released from a cage

Having made the change, and enjoying the freedom it is providing, it seems that history is also on my side - a shot of the top 15 Australian run scorers in Test and first-class cricket recently appeared on our change-room wall. The photos were taken as the bowler was in his delivery stride. All but one batsman has his bat touching the ground. Admittedly most then move their bat upwards as the ball is leaving the hand, ready to pounce.

Imitation, they say, is the greatest form of flattery. For years Australians would mock English batting techniques as structured and complicated, and yet we have a generation of Australian cricketers replicating their styles. Cricket on television is an important medium for skill development, but also turns the players into imitators. Trying to bat like your favourite player is akin to a teenage girl wanting to dress like Kim Kardashian. Perhaps in their formative years of the mid-2000s - years that saw such English dominance (think Cook, Pietersen and Bell at their best) - youngsters jumped ship on the "Australian way" and imitated those succeeding at the time.

Finding your way as a young professional brings you up against the ultimate paradox. You may try to find consistency to ensure a lengthy career in a tough but financially rewarding environment by minimising risk and simply "surviving", but this will no doubt diminish your ability to put pressure on the bowlers. The more pressure the bowler feels, the more likely they are going to serve up more run-scoring balls and fewer wicket-taking ones. Even in this day and age of travelling batting coaches, analysts, mentors and batting gurus, the journey to find improvement and how you want to play is self-driven. Effective coaching is as much about leading the horse to the trough and allowing self-discovery, as arousing its interest in a drink.

The tide, though, it seems, is turning. I have seen Adam Voges in recent seasons - perhaps at the suggestion of Langer - go back to his natural best, George Bailey and Tim Paine, both fine players and as naturally gifted as they come, too have returned to tapping their bats in recent weeks and months.

Writing about my own batting seems a little self-indulgent, but the motive is simply to illuminate my journey and self-discovery in what has been a ten-year batting evolution. Perhaps if just one young cricketer retains his naturalness then the self-indulgence will be worthwhile.

Ed Cowan is a top-order batsman with Tasmania and Australia.

The Joy of Six: Kevin Pietersen

JFK innings, maestro moments and swaggering slogs, the batsman who made you think: is something brilliant happening?

Kevin Pietersen practices his indie-frontman pose for Observer Sport Monthly in 2005. Photograph: Karen Robinson for the Observer

1) The KP moment

There is a delightful scene in the final episode of Nathan Barley, Charlie Brooker's documentary about life at the Guardian. A TV executive has a pint poured over him in the pub and, after reacting with anger, suddenly thinks all might not be what it seems. "Are you guys the crew?" he says, looking round the pub. "Are we all in this? Is something brilliant happening?"

That scene came to mind every time Kevin Pietersen batted. Pietersen was a consistent provider of one of sport's greatest thrills: the sense that something brilliant might be about to happen. Sport is an intrinsically underwhelming experience, such is the chasm between fantasy and reality. Yet Pietersen's Ashes-winning 158, which came so early in his career, established the parameters of his talent – or rather that there were hardly any parameters. The reality of Pietersen did not just match the fantasy; it exceeded it. Not even Walter Mitty could have imagined some of those shots he played.

Every time he was at the crease it was legitimate to think we might be about to witness something epic. And when he got going, it was impossible to contain your excitement. Nobody else made you want to text a friend or rush to the nearest public social-networking house and say excitedly to the nearest person: "Are you watching the cricket? Pietersen's on one here." That's how special Pietersen was: he made you want to talk to strangers.

The excitement of what he might achieve was only half the story. There have been umpteen batsmen with the capacity to dramatically change the population of a bar – emptying them at the ground, filling them in town centres – yet few had Pietersen's combination of omnipotence and fragility. With the obvious exception of Brian Lara, it is hard to think of a batsman with a bigger gap between his top and bottom level of performance. Pietersen could look like Donald Bradman and Phil Tufnell, often in the same innings, sometimes in the same over. He was notoriously nervous at the start of his innings, hence one of his most memorably quirks: the Red Bull single to get off the mark.

With Pietersen, nobody knew anything. You would think you could spot the tell-tale signs that he was going to make a hundred; you'd think you'd visibly see him enter the zone, and two minutes later he'd hook to deep square leg or smack one against the breeze to long-on. Or you'd comment how scratchy he was looking and in the blink of an eye he would be 80 not out and batting like a lord. This, coupled with his mixed popularity and the consequently exaggerated drama of his success and failure, made him the most unputdownable book in sport.

Most of Pietersen's great knocks came after or even during a dodgy spell of form: his Man of the Series performance in England's World T20 win in 2010 was a brief, stratospheric high in the most traumatic year of his career. During the tour of Bangladesh two months earlier, he says he had basically forgotten how to bat and thought his career was in serious jeopardy.

In 2012 he played 17 Test innings in Asia, averaging a modest 39.43. A mediocre year then? Not quite. His scores were 2, 0, 14, 1, 32, 18, 3, 30, 151, 42*, 17, 2, 186, 54, 0, 73, 6 and the two centuries – at Colombo and Mumbai – are the two greatest innings played by an Englishman in Asia. There was a moment in both those centuries when you knew, or you thought you knew, that it was on.

In this age of constant newsflashes, previously reserved for JFK moments, Sky Sports News' yellow ticker should simply have said: BREAKING NEWS: KEVIN PIETERSEN IS BATTING whenever he was at the crease. In sport, JFK moments are supposed to relate to off-field events. We think we know what to expect with the context of the actual sport, so nothing should be so mind-blowing as to become a JFK moment. Yet Pietersen's ability to play with otherworldly genius was such that he became a specialist in JFK innings. Where were you for the 158, the 151, the 149 or the 186?

Within every JFK innings lurked a KP moment, when he did something – a booming drive, a look in his eye, even an ultra-certain defensive stroke – that made you wonder: is something brilliant happening? Whether he succeeded or failed, the answer was usually yes. Pietersen was the point at which sport's three greatest pleasures – partisanship, unpredictability and unimaginable genius – were perfectly in sync.

2) The match-winner

 Kevin Pietersen plays a reverse sweep on the third day of the second cricket Test match against Sri Lanka in 2012 Photograph: Eranga Jayawardena/AP

There are lies, bald-faced lies and this statistic: Ian Bell has scored more hundreds in Test victories than any other England batsman, including Kevin Pietersen. Bell is an exquisite talent, whose batting in last summer's Ashes was the finest we have ever seen by an England batsman over an entire series. But to compare him with Pietersen in this sphere is daft. Pietersen did not make hundreds in England victories; he made match-winning hundreds.

At his best, Pietersen's runs were so resounding and symbolic as to make the rest of the game an apparent formality. He was a master of mental disintegration. There was the brutal 227 at Adelaide – without which England would have been 1-0 down going into the final two Tests of the series. There was the six-laden 151 in Colombo in 2012 , the most spectacular catharsis after moments of DRS torment. In that match at Colombo he scored 193 off 193 balls, including eight sixes, and was out once. So an average of 193 and a strike rate of 100. The other 21 players averaged 29 and scored at a strike rate of 40.

It was not just that Pietersen did things mere mortals could not; he did things that were beyond his fellow immortals. Very few batsmen in history could have played Pietersen's true masterpiece, the reintegration 186 at Mumbai. That was deemed the fourth-best Test innings of all time in the book Masterly Batting, the most forensic study of the greatest Test innings that we have come across. (Yes we did write an essay for the book but that's not the point.)

Pietersen had three innings in the top 100 of that book; only Don Bradman, Brian Lara, Graham Gooch and Gordon Greenidge had more. Since Lara retired, nobody has played as many epics as Pietersen. There is also the weirdly underrated 142 in a low-scoring match at Edgbaston in 2006 (nobody else scored more than 30 in the first innings), when he switch-hit Muttiah Muralitharan for six. There was the Ashes 158, which did not win a match but did win a mildly important series, and our personal favourite, the 149 against South Africa at Headingley on Super Saturday of the Olympics. Trust Pietersen to rise to the big occasion.

In the last couple of years we have seen the development of a dubious, almost smug cliché that Pietersen is a player of great innings rather than a great player. Pietersen's overall record stands up extremely well – his Test average of 47.28 is the highest by an England batsman since Geoff Boycott retired in 1982 – but far more significant are two things not recorded in Wisden: the number of neck hairs he had made stand to attention, and the impact his runs have had.

Let's be clear about this. Without Pietersen, England would not have won the Ashes in 2005 and might not have won them in 2010-11; they would not have won their first Test in Sri Lanka for 11 years; they probably would not have won in India in 2012-13 or triumphed in the World T20 in 2010. Pietersen played a series of exceptional innings that won things for his team and took out a lease in the memory bank. If that's not greatness, then we're not sure what is.

3) The skunk punk

 Kevin Pietersen acknowledges the applause of the Oval crowd as he walks off having scored 158 runs during the final day of the fifth test of the 2005 Ashes series. Photograph: Kieran Doherty / Reuters/Reuters

The legend of Kevin Pietersen's life-changing innings is told thus: the greatest Ashes series of all time was at stake, England needed to bat for a draw, and this daft bugger went on a demented joyride! That is how we will remember his Ashes-winning 158 at The Oval on 12 September 2005. There was actually a little more to it than that. Pietersen played four innings in one day, two of them at the same time. Before lunch he was nervous and unsure of how to play; he was a punchbag for Brett Lee and fortunate to survive two dropped chances. Between lunch and tea, he marmalised Lee and Shaun Tait while blocking Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne. And after tea, with the Ashes won, he let his skunk down and had some fun against all-comers.

At lunch England were 127 for five, a lead of 133 with a possible 64 overs remaining. There wasn't a dry nail in the house. It's still a little chilling to reflect how close England were to not winning the Ashes. Pietersen was 35 from 60 balls. He had played scratchily apart from two defiant slog-swept sixes in one Warne over. The story goes that, after a chat with his captain Michael Vaughan, he simply decided "To hell with it" and went after everything that moved. In fact the innings was far subtler.

Warne and Lee continued after lunch. Pietersen launched into Lee, flogging him for a staggering 35 from 13 balls, including two hooked sixes and four fours. Lee's bowling peaked at 96.7mph – notably faster than Mitchell Johnson right now – yet Pietersen took on almost every delivery.

All the while, at the other end, he milked Warne clear-headedly. When Lee was replaced by McGrath, Pietersen pressed the stop button. England scored 19 from the next 11 overs, all bowled by the two champions, before Ricky Ponting replaced McGrath with Tait. The first two balls were flogged for four and in the next half an hour Pietersen savaged Tait for 22 from 12 balls. By tea, the Ashes were all but won. In that decisive session, Pietersen took Lee and Tait for 57 off 25 balls at a strike-rate of 228 runs per 100 balls. Off Warne and McGrath he scored 13 from 41 balls at a strike rate of 32. He had a first gear, a tenth gear and nothing in between. Not bad for someone who can only play one way.

This is not to say Pietersen could not give McGrath and Warne tap. In his first Test innings at Lord's he carted McGrath back over his head for an absurd six born of the most magnificent disrespect, and he spent the summer slog-sweeping his mate Warne into the crowd at midwicket (as well as being dismissed by him on a few occasions). Those slog sweeps are perhaps the most memorable feature of Pietersen's first summer as a Test cricketer, not least because it was a shot he eschewed as time went on. (It made a brief and wonderful comeback during his Mumbai maestropiece in 2012.)

Pietersen became a far better batsman than he was in 2005: technically tighter, more complete, more mature, a lot more accomplished on the off side. He even managed to overcome the nervous 158s. Yet though he remained one of the most entertaining batsman around, he never had quite the same exhilarating skunk punk edge of his first year in international cricket. In that time he also made those three one-day hundreds in South Africa and hammered Jason Gillespie into the knackers' yard in an ODI at Bristol, after which his captain Vaughan became the first significant person to use the G-word. Andrew Flintoff recalls Pietersen sitting in the dressing-room saying "Not bad am I?"

Not bad at all for a man who five years earlier was a tail-end slogger called Pieterson. After 10 ODI innings in 2004-05, his average was 162.25. As with the Prodigy's Experience, Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets and Michael van Gerwen in the second half of 2012, this was a raw, visceral introduction that would eventually become only a small part of a complete body of work. But that subsequent maturity partially obscures just how incredibly fresh and exciting he was in his first year. Pietersen, for richer and poorer, was never the same batsman after 2005. And although he played better innings than the 158, it was his career-defining performance.

4) The pace batsman

 Kevin Pietersen mauls South Africa during the World Twenty20 tournament in 2010. Photograph: Julian Herbert/Getty Images

Kevin Pietersen was a pace batsman. Not in the sense that he scored his runs quickly, but that he thrillingly reversed the traditional relationship between fast bowler and batsman, hunter and hunted, intimidating opponents with his size and aggression. He followed in the swaggering footsteps of Viv Richards, Matthew Hayden and others by playing the batsman as physical bully. Sometimes he even gave the fast bowlers some chin music of their own, belabouring life-threatening straight drives.

Three particular innings stand out. At the Oval in 2005 he drowned Brett Lee and Shaun Tait in their own adrenaline; he played Tarzan cricket against Morne Morkel and Dale Steyn at the World T20, mauling Steyn for 23 from 8 balls – including a flamingo shot to the offside - and sent an unprecedented shiver down Mike Selvey's spine; and at Headingley in 2012 he played the most otherworldly innings the Joy of Six has ever seen, when he was obviously in the zone that he should have had a forcefield around him.

Pietersen loved taking on the spinners, he loved to prove his technical class with off- and on-drives. But nothing stimulated him quite like the chance to assert his alpha-male status via the medium of pummelling 95mph deliveries all round the park. And nothing stimulated us the same way either.

5) The dumbslog millionaire

 A dejected Kevin Pietersen leaves the field after being dimissed on 97 during the first day of the first Test match against West Indies at Sabina Park. Photograph: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images

Kevin Pietersen took 183 Test wickets. Ten with the ball, and 173 with his own bat. To explain: it is hard to recall a batsman whose dismissals brought such focus – not just because they were an event, but because they were always his fault. Pietersen never got a good ball in his career. He was never got out. He always got himself out.

It's true that there were plenty of notorious shots. The dumbslog millionaire incident in Jamaica 2009, and a similar dismissal against South Africa at Edgbaston a year earlier. (Both times he was trying to reach a hundred with a six. Pietersen often could not resist going to a hundred on his terms: he did so with a reverse sweep in the 2012 epics at Colombo and Mumbai.) There was the lap sweep off Nathan Hauritz at Cardiff in 2009, and plenty of flat-footed wafts or pulls straight to long leg or deep-square leg.

Sometimes his confidence could backfire comically. In 2006 he said there was simply no way he could be bowled round his legs by Shane Warne; guess what dismissal catalysed the miracle of Adelaide. The same winter, Pietersen treated an ageing Glenn McGrath with disdain, walking down the wicket repeatedly during the one-dayers. McGrath broke his ribs with a bouncer.

It does nonetheless feel that Pietersen dismissals invited disproportionate opprobrium. While he found many weird and wonderful ways to get out in Australia last winter, for example, so did Ian Bell. Bell dragged a full toss from a part-time spinner to midwicket; he drove his first ball straight to mid-off; he played a late cut straight to gully. Hardly a word was said.

The idea that Pietersen couldn't care less about the team was not fair. For one thing he knew, from the moment he made that 158 against Australia, that individual glory was multiplied tenfold when it facilitated team glory. And he often knuckled down. In that 158 at The Oval he played like Chris Tavare and Viv Richards at the same time, while his tone-setting double-century against India at Lord's 2011 – an innings whose brilliance has been obscured by the 4-0 mauling that it set up - was a masterpiece of moving through the gears as conditions get easier: his four fifties respectively took 134 balls, then 82,85 and 25.

There's no question that Pietersen was occasionally driven to excessive stubborn, hiding behind the catch-all phrase "That's the way I play". Yet there was an essential truth in that. The poor strokes were inextricably linked to the outrageous shots; both came from the instinctive, often flawed shot selection that also allowed him to play innings of staggering genius. It borders on infantile to celebrate the audacious shots and chastise the cheap dismissals. Dolly Parton and David Brent would have understood Pietersen.

Pietersen had to do things on his terms; without that he was nothing. To criticise him for a poor shot is like moaning about an ecstasy comedown or a broken heart at the end of the best relationship of your life. It may be a simple case of English suspicion of unusual talent, the same that manifested itself when David Gower wafted lazily to slip. In this country, certain types of dismissals are morally acceptable. This is not to absolve Pietersen of all blame. No man can bat with impunity. Yet as with Gower there seemed to be a damaging desire to mould Pietersen into something he could never be. He had to play it as he saw it. And he saw cricket through different eyes to normal human beings.

Those eyes allowed him to conceive and play some of the most extraordinary strokes. He took advantage of the possibilities afforded Test batsmen first by Steve Waugh and then by Twenty20. The established norms and mores of five-day cricket have been shattered, as has the coaching manual. Just as language has never been more flexible and exciting, nor has Test batting. Pietersen developed his own urban coaching manual, full of unique and totally modern shots.

The most celebrated, the switch hit, never really got the Joy of Six going: it was brilliant and audacious but not unique. Far more spine-tingling were the established, conventional shots that Pietersen remixed. The flick through midwicket, with added flamingo; the straight drive played wristily and on the run; and our favourite, this dreamy slow-motion pull off Dale Steyn.

In an interview with All Out Cricket last year, Pietersen picked out that and anotherdreamy swipe off Pragyan Ojha at Mumbai as his favourite shots. "The slowness of my bat speed through those balls is what stands out to me," he said. "I look at those two shots – and I don't normally like to talk about my shots – but I do occasionally look at those and go, 'How the hell did you do that?' I don't know …"

Some things are best left unexplained.

6a) The dressing-room influence

 England's Alastair Cook and Kevin Pietersen look-on from the dressing room balcony during day four of the third Test at the WACA on 16 December, 2013. Photograph: Anthony Devlin/PA

In 2012, the sarcastic air violins came out when Kevin Pietersen said: "It's not easy being me in that dressing-room." In fact it's the most undeniable thing he's ever said. For much of his nine-and-a-bit years in international cricket It was clearly not easy being Pietersen in the England dressing-room; the only thing worthy of debate is whose fault that was.

There have been tedious assumptions about who did what to prompt Pietersen's sacking. The principal emotion should be sadness, not anger. It is wrong to assume that England need to give a specific example of Pietersen's behaviour, or even that there is a specific example; often it's an accumulation of incidents that create a sense that is not easy to articulate. Pick the person you most dislike at work and then try to explain to an outsider why that is so. It doesn't look nearly as powerful on the page as it is in your head. The same is probably true of England's intractable conviction that Pietersen was a damaging dressing-room influence.

It's insulting to suggest that this was a decision taken on a whim, because Alastair Cook, Paul Downton and the rest didn't fancy the hassle. The fact we have seen this storyline played out so many times before suggests Pietersen cannot be entirely innocent. It is probably a failure of management to some extent, but then there is always a point at which something becomes unmanageable. There is always something beyond the pale.

That doesn't mean the decision was necessarily fair on Pietersen. He will argue that his problems on the recent Ashes tour, and with Peter Moores, came from nothing more than a desire for excellence and an abhorrence of mediocrity that was too much for weak minds. It would be extremely unwise to assume that just because Pietersen is in a minority, he is intrinsically wrong; there are umpteen historical examples, in far more important walks of life of sport, that remind us of that.

In an age of passive-aggressive manipulation, there is something refreshing about Pietersen apparently wanting to have things out in the open with his team-mates (even if, when it comes to briefing and PR, he is as disappointingly snide as the rest). He might also argue that England had no problems with him when they were winning and he was scoring monstrous centuries. It's legitimate to wonder how this England team might have coped with Sir Ian Botham and Shane Warne. The key point is that we simply don't know; at best we are making uneducated guesses.

The relationship between the England team and Pietersen was often described as a marriage of convenience yet in a sense they were more like acquaintances with benefits. We should have known it was going to end like this.

6b) The conversation-starter

 Kevin Pietersen acknowledges the crowd during England's 2005 Ashes celebrations. Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian

Never mind the dressing-room; it was not easy being Pietersen out in the middle. Sometimes it was his sanctuary, other times he batted under unimaginable pressure. Sachin Tendulkar batted with the hopes of millions of India on his shoulders – but at least they all wanted him to succeed. Pietersen batted knowing that 50% of Englishmen were desperate for him to succeed and 50% even more desperate for him to fail. Sometimes he even had to play against two teams, as during his astonishing 149 against South Africa and England at Headingley in 2012.

It's often said that Pietersen batted for himself; as his career went on, he had little choice but to do that, so isolated did he become. Which is the chicken and which is the egg in this situation will be forever debated. Either way, he had to bat knowing that, whatever happened, he would be the watercooler's hottest topic afterwards.

He had a unique burden. He had to hit sixes but not get out trying to hit sixes. He had to counter-attack but not get out counter-attacking. In the 2007 World Cup, England needed him to be pinch-hitter, anchor and death-hitter all in one. It was an absurd burden.

That, coupled with his perpetual sense – fair or not – of being misunderstood and unloved, makes you wonder just what he would have achieved with unconditional love. Sometimes the awkwardness made him bat better. Unpopularity can be the most powerful fuel of all, but only in the short-term, unless you are a WWF wrestler. Over time it will have weighed heavily both on his conscious and unconscious.

The phrase "We need to talk about Kevin" quickly became a boring cliché. It arguably missed the point. We didn't just need to talk about Kevin because of what Kevin did, as in the film; we needed to talk about Kevin whether he did anything or not, because he enlivened our grubby, boring lives. He brought out the village gossip in us all. He was so charismatic that we became addicted to him, so we discussed things that we would not with other players. Our lives will be significantly duller without him.

Winning is everything? Sorry, no

In cricket, as in other sports, it's not about the statistics and the bottomline. It's about how much joy you give, how well you are loved and remembered

Ed Smith

December 7, 2011

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	Mark Waugh: never mind the average © Getty Images Enlarge
Related Links Players/Officials: Greg Chappell | Sir Viv Richards | Mark Waugh

Hundreds of thousands of men and women have played professional football. None, surely, could have so fully lived up to the name Socrates. He played as though football was a creative puzzle, to be teased out like a philosophical enquiry. He played with grace but also with lightness.

Not all of you may have encountered a mischievous theory called nominative determinism. The idea is that people are predetermined to pursue certain professions by their names: your name is your fate. Britain's leading jurist is called Igor Judge (his professional billing is "Judge Judge"); the world's fastest man is called Usain Bolt; and "Dudus" Coke awaits trial in the US for allegedly running the Jamaican drugs mafia.

Socrates certainly lived up to his nominative destiny. He was a qualified doctor, a political activist and an independent thinker. His attitude to life was appropriately philosophical. He knew that smoking and drinking were damaging his health, but retorted, "It's a problem, but we all have to die of something, don't we?"

The same joie de vivre informed Socrates' attitude to sport. He was unflinchingly committed to the joga bonito - the beautiful game. "Beauty comes first. Victory is secondary. What matters is joy." Even people who don't like football remember being uplifted by Socrates' grace and audacity. They remember his mistakes as well as his triumphs. They remember his movement and imagination as well as his goals. And they remember that he was unique - perhaps the highest accolade any sportsman can achieve. I almost forgot the most important thing of all: he is remembered, full stop.

A great deal is written about greatness in sport. There is a natural human urge to seek objectivity and proof about who is the greatest. Averages are measured, metrics invented, comparisons fed through the meat grinder of statistical analysis.

But statistics, I'm afraid, can never tell us the whole truth about greatness. Because sporting achievement is not quite the same thing as greatness. Look at cricket. Viv Richards was an exceptional performer in Test cricket, but he wasn't off the map in terms of pure stats. Greg Chappell and other contemporaries pushed him hard. But in terms of greatness, Viv stood alone. The numbers don't quite capture the complete Viv effect - not just on opponents but also on fans. Whenever I remember watching him on television, a smile comes over my face - even now, 25 years later.

Mark Waugh's Test match average was "only" 41 (that still sounds pretty good to me, but it's undeniable that lots of players average 41 these days). But the numbers don't reflect the pleasure he gave. A sublime Waugh flick through midwicket was only worth four runs - the same as an ugly thick edge from a lesser batsman - but it was worth much more to those who paid money to watch.

Some of the most astonishing things Waugh did on a cricket field weren't recorded at all. Greg Chappell tells a lovely story in his book The Making of Champions about watching Waugh field on the footholds at extra cover and midwicket in ODIs. The ball would be bouncing unpredictably on the footholds and Waugh would swoop effortlessly and pick it up without fumbling or diving, like a cat pouncing on a ball of string. Chappell writes that he wanted to stand up and cheer every time. Statistically it was an non-event. For the discerning fan, it was pure magic.

According to the averages, the racist cheat Ty Cobb was a better batter than Babe Ruth. But Cobb was nowhere near as great a sportsman. Not if we use the correct measurement: the extent to which he was loved and remembered.

If you still think that winning in sport is all about the final score, I recommend reading Rafa: My Story, the unflinchingly honest autobiography by Rafael Nadal. When he writes about Roger Federer, his great rival, something strange happens to Nadal. Rationally he knows that he has beaten Federer more often than Federer has beaten him, but he insists that Federer is the greater player. Partly, that is because Federer still possesses more grand slams. But the deeper reason is that Nadal deeply respects - perhaps even envies - the way Federer plays. "You get these blessed freaks of nature in other sports, too."

	If you produce grim, boring and joyless sport, it is reassuring to fall back on the delusion that it is all in a worthy cause. Socrates knew better. He knew that sportsmen are entertainers

Here is the interesting thing. Nadal does not congratulate himself for being the more worthy champion. He congratulates Federer for the more sublime talent. And Nadal may be right. In an era of wonderful tennis players, Federer has been the most elegant, refined and instinctive.

Socrates' death has been described as a terrible day for sporting romantics. In fact, it is a much sadder day for sporting ultra-rationalists. Because the win-at-all-costs brigade has once again been shown to be completely wrong. Socrates never won the World Cup, and lost the biggest match of his career playing on his own terms. And how is he remembered? As a loser? No. He is remembered with respect, with adoration, with love. Over the long term, it is very simple: he won.

Remember Socrates' career and legacy the next time you hear "Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing." That was American football coach Vince Lombardi's dictum about sporting priorities. And in the 50 years since Lombardi's quip, the reductionism of winning at all costs has hardened into conventional wisdom.

Of course, it is a consoling thought - if you're a production-line automaton incapable of playing sport creatively, or if you're a coach determined to stamp out individuality and risk. Yes, if you produce grim, boring and joyless sport, it is reassuring to fall back on the delusion that it is all in a worthy cause.

Socrates knew better. He knew that sportsmen are entertainers. They must try to win, too (no one is entertained by skill without will). But entertainment is not bolted onto sport as an afterthought. It is at the core of the whole project.

Professional athletes are only the temporary custodians of their sports. Their highest calling is to pass it on to the next generation enhanced rather than diminished. By that measure Socrates won - and he won big.