One morning in July 2011, a taxi sat wandering outside Petco Park stadium in San Diego. And Wade LeBlanc, a (an) ____1____ pitcher (棒球投手) for the Padres, climbed in.“ To the airport, please,” he told the driver. LeBlanc was headed to Tucson, Arizona, home of the club’s A-level branch organization at the time. He’d been sent down to the minors. Again. For the eighth time in three years.
“You’re Wade LeBlanc,” the taxi driver said.
“Right.”
“You got some good stuff.”
This ____2____ the pitcher, after the previous night’s disastrous performance.
“I think there are some things you should think about ____3____,” the driver continued.“ I don ‘t know; I ’m not a ____4____. Maybe something like going over your head in your windup (摆臂动作)”
Wait, what? This guy was offering… ____5____? Earlier in his career, LeBlanc might have ____6____. Or been angry. But today, he just ____7____. He couldn’t afford to dismiss anything. His career was on the line.
The next day, in Tucson, LeBlanc met his ____8____. He said he was thinking about making ____9____ to his windup. His coach agreed. Instead of keeping his hands tight to his chest at the beginning of his delivery, LeBlanc raised them briefly over his head, as the taxi driver had ____10____.
LeBlanc included the new ____11____ into his next start. And he was ____12____, allowing only one hit over seven innings ( 回 合 ). It was the turning point in his career. Eight years later, LeBlanc is a pitcher for the Seattle Mariners. He signed the first contract extension of his Major League Baseball career-at age 33.
The funny thing about advice: We so often take it from the ____13____ people. That is, we ____14____ the advice of experts, while undervaluing the input of regular folk. Wade LeBlanc ____15____ that trend, and he obtained the ____16____.
“Expert advisers often make surprisingly inaccurate predictions about the future, yet people ____17____ their suggestions nevertheless,” concluded Stanford University psychologists in a study published last year.
Now, not everyone took experts’ advice. The more ____18____ people become, the smaller the pool of advisers they ____19____. Participants in positions of power ignored almost two thirds of the advice they received, according to one Harvard University study. Other participants-the control and low power groups-ignored advice about half as often. So it required a massive increase of modesty (谦虚) to do what Wade LeBlanc did: hear what the taxi driver was offering him and accept it as a(an) ____20____.