Things Don’t Have Signs On Them That Say, “This Is A Big Thing”
At sixteen, Mike Nichols’s girlfriend’s parents gave him tickets to a Broadway play that turned out to redirect the course of his life. In college, a chance interaction with a cafeteria busboy led to him attending weekly improv workshops, where he soaked up practices and principles of creativity and collaboration that turned out to define his career. At a train station, he struck up a conversation with Elaine May, beginning a friendship that led to them forming “Nichols and May,” an improv duo whose Grammy-winning comedy albums and hit Broadway shows made them a national sensation. Looking back on these and other decisive moments in his life, Nichols was struck by the deceptive nature of things—the way a seemingly minor thing can turn out to be an important thing, for instance. Or the way an apparently negative thing can turn out to be a positive thing. Or the way an initially unsuccessful thing can turn out to be a celebrated thing. “You don’t know what’s going to happen,” Nichols said. “Big things look like little things. Little things don’t have big signs on them that say, ‘This Is a Big Thing.’ They look like everything else. Disaster can reorder our lives in wonderful ways, and you just go on to the next thing.”
The deceptive nature of things—the way things can appear one way at first (or even for a while) but turn out to be the opposite of what they seemed—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
It Was Not Kind Of An Asset. It Was The Asset.
In nine seasons with the Indianapolis Colts, center Ryan Kelly lined up with 13 different quarterbacks, an unusual amount of turnover at professional football’s most important position. Unlike some long-tenured centers who played with only a handful of quarterbacks over their whole careers, Kelly played with a handful almost every year and never had one starting quarterback play an entire season. As his contract was expiring at the end of the 2024 season, adding to the frustrations of the constant instability at the position, the Colts’ quarterback situation looked as uncertain as ever heading into the following year. So Kelly entered free agency, and within hours of the league’s negotiating window opening in March 2025, he agreed to terms with the Minnesota Vikings. A few weeks later, I saw Kelly’s dad and asked him about the free agency process—what other teams were in the mix, whether Minnesota had been high on Ryan’s list of potential destinations, and so on. He said: since the Vikings already had a very good center a few years younger than him, Ryan never considered them an option and was stunned when his agent called to say they were eager to sign him and wanted him on the next plane to Minnesota for a physical and meetings with the coaches and team executives. In one of those meetings, conversation turned to what it was about Ryan that the Vikings were so interested. The year before, the Vikings traded up in the draft to select a high-upside quarterback they believe can be great for many years to come, and they wanted to bring in a center who could not only protect him but also help shepherd his development. And when they looked around the league, no one had worked with as many different quarterbacks as Ryan, an unusual amount of experience they saw as invaluable in bringing their young quarterback along. “It’s interesting,” I said to Ryan’s dad, “that what had been a source of frustration—so many different quarterbacks coming and going in Indianapolis—kind of became an asset.” “It was not kind of an asset,” he said. “It was the asset.”
If The Shark Had Worked, The Movie Wouldn’t Have
In Jaws, you don’t see the shark until 1 hour and 21 minutes into the movie. That wasn’t the plan. The script called for the mechanical shark, affectionately nicknamed “Bruce,” to be featured prominently throughout the film. When Bruce was tested in a Hollywood fresh water tank, it worked fine. But when production moved to the Atlantic Ocean, the salt water corroded its electrical components and the shark broke. So director Steven Spielberg faced what seemed like the worst thing that could possibly happen on the set of a movie conceived to revolve around a working mechanical shark. Working on a tight budget and schedule that left no room to delay, Spielberg reimagined the movie. Instead of shooting direct encounters with the shark, he developed techniques to create the illusion of the shark’s point of view. “I played a lot of the fear from the people in the water,” Spielberg explained, “from seeing their legs kicking, from the point of view of the camera moving along the surface of the water.” Filming as though through the shark’s eyes as it glided just under the surface in a slow, menacing advance—“That’s what turned the movie into more of an exercise in suspense than just a horror film,” Spielberg later reflected. “Jaws is scary because of what you don’t see, not because of what you do.” Later asked about Bruce’s disastrous breakdown, Spielberg said it turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to the movie. If he’d had the shark working as planned in the original script, he said, “I would have made a movie that wouldn’t have been as successful…I think the film would have made half the money had the shark worked.”
What Bad Luck!
The origins of this story are difficult to trace. It evokes an era where farming was the primary livelihood, horses were vital to do this farming, and conscription for military service worked like this: if the army showed up at your door and said you were in, you stopped what you were doing and marched off to war. So the story probably takes place sometime between ancient times (200-ish BC) and the late medieval period (1500s). Most often, it’s set in China. Although in some tellings, the samurai show up. So—somewhere in China or Japan, at some point across a 1700-year span—there was a farmer. One day, the farmer’s only horse ran away. The neighbors rushed over and yelled, “What bad luck!” The farmer shrugged, “Good luck? Bad luck? It’s impossible to know.” A few days later, the horse returned with a herd of wild horses. The neighbors rushed over again and this time yelled, “What good luck!” The farmer shrugged and repeated, “Good luck? Bad luck? It’s impossible to know.” A few days later, while trying to corral the wild stallions, one kicked the farmer’s son and broke his leg. The neighbors: “What bad luck!” The farmer: “Good luck? Bad luck? It’s impossible to know.” A few days later, the Han army or the Kamakura Samurai or some other large military unit showed up unannounced at the farm and demanded that the son (Dad’s too old) take up arms or sword or bow and arrow and join them in a bloody war. But when they saw the son’s broken leg, they rode or walked away. And instead of being sent to the front lines—and likely to his death—the son stayed home on the farm. Good luck? Bad luck?
You Can’t Plan The Things That Change Your Life
Steve Jobs liked to say that you can’t plan the things that change your life. Then he’d tell this story. In the very early days of Apple, Jobs was invited to speak at Stanford’s business school one Thursday afternoon. He wasn’t feeling great that day, and he had a big dinner that night with “some important customers.” Still, he accepted the speaking invitation, making sure it was scheduled early enough that he would be on time for the big dinner. During the talk, he noticed a young woman in the crowd he couldn’t stop glancing over at, causing him to keep “forgetting what I was talking about mid-sentence.” After the talk, he stayed around for a bit to speak with some of the students before walking to the parking lot, where he spotted the young woman once more. He went over and asked if she would have dinner with him that Saturday. She said yes and they exchanged phone numbers. As he walked to his car to head to the big dinner with the important customers, Jobs wondered if it was actually with the girl that he was meant to have a big, important dinner with that night. “I raced back to her car,” Jobs wrote, “just as she was about to drive off, and asked her, ‘How about dinner tonight?’ She said: ‘Sure,’ and we were married 18 months later…You can’t plan to meet the people who will change your life. It just happens. Maybe it’s random, maybe it’s fate. Either way, you can’t plan for it. But you want to recognize it when it happens, and have the courage and clarity of mind to grab onto it.”
The Nonchoosing Point of View
The philosopher and writer Alan Watts’ advice was to “refrain from thinking of things in terms of gain or loss, advantage or disadvantage, because one never knows. Receiving a letter from a law office tomorrow saying that some distant relative of yours has left you a million dollars might make you feel very happy, but the windfall may well lead to unbelievable disaster—including a visit from the Internal Revenue Service, just to mention one possibility. In fact we never really know whether an event is fortune or misfortune, we only know our ever-changing reactions to ever-changing events…Understand that there is not any fixed good or bad; this point of view is called nonchoosing.” Whereas “This is a Big Thing,” “This is an Important Thing,” “This is a Frustrating Thing,” “This is a Bad Thing,” “This is a Good Thing,” “This is a Lucky Thing,” and “This is an Unlucky Thing” is called choosing.