Successful business leaders as well as Olympic winners even fall prey.

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In our world-is-flat, winner-take-all economy, many futurists said the winners would fall into two camps: super nimble start-ups from Silicon Valley (and similar hotbeds) wielding world-class technology and talent and the largest multinationals with brand, reach and fortress balance sheets.

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The next season, they made it to the NFC Championship, only to fall to the eventual Super Bowl winners, the New York Giants.

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Psychologist Richard Wiseman from the University of Hertfordshire has studied the differences between the winners and losers in the resolution race and found those who fail, are more likely to fall by the wayside within the first week.

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And perhaps the Karolinska could spare a thought for Leroy Hood, who invented the sequencing technique that made the whole thing possible though that work might, more properly, fall within the purview of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences, which decides the winners of the chemistry (and also the physics) prizes.

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