The Small Choices
The psychologist Amos Tversky was once asked why he became a psychologist. “It’s hard to know how people select a course in life,” he said. “The big choices we make are practically random. The small choices tell us more about who we are. Which field we go into may depend on which high school teacher we happen to meet. Who we marry may depend on who happens to be around at the right time of life. On the other hand, the small decisions are very systematic. That I became a psychologist is probably not very revealing. What kind of psychologist I am may reflect deep traits.”
Small, deeply revealing, highly consequential choices—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
Because The Wind Was Blowing One Day Many Years Ago
More than two decades into his career as a philosopher and professor, Talbot Brewer was asked how it all began. Just out of college, he was working his first job at an academic publishing house in New York City. One windy day, he went out to get some lunch. As he was walking along Broadway on the Upper West Side, Brewer saw a young woman crossing the street with a stack of empty boxes. The wind caught the boxes and scattered them around. He jogged over, helped her collect them and get across the street. Then he asked what all the empty boxes were for. The woman worked for an estate-settlement company, she explained, and was on her way to discard a bunch of books that hadn’t sold at an estate sale. “Well, could I look at them before you throw them away?” Brewer asked. She agreed, and so Brewer went with her to what turned out to be the apartment of a recently deceased Columbia University professor. “It was chock-full of philosophy books,” Brewer said. He went home with “this wonderful, inherited library of philosophy books,” and began down the path of reading, studying, and teaching philosophy that he is still on today. “And so really,” Brewer said, “I’m here because the wind was blowing”—and all the little choices that followed—”on the Upper West Side one day many years ago. That’s the answer…You never know what will change in life. You really don’t. But that’s my story.”
The Cootie Department
Paula Scher is one of the world’s most influential graphic designers. You’ve encountered her work if you’ve used Microsoft Windows, eaten at Shake Shack, seen the Boston album cover, or visited a Citibank, the MoMA, or New York City. Yet when Scher talks about her career, she often describes it as accidental: “Everything was very accidental.” “It was all a bit accidental and happenstance.” “I find more and more that artistic success is accidental and circumstantial.” Once, when an interviewer pushed back on the idea that she had simply been lucky, Scher paused and thought of something else. One of her first jobs out of college was in the promotions department at CBS Records—the “cootie department,” as it was known. A designer there, Scher said, “was the lowest form of graphic designer. People in the other departments didn’t talk to us. We were beneath even their contempt.” Still, Scher poured herself into the work. When she suggested small improvements to an ad, colleagues would tell her, “Oh, nobody’s gonna see that. Who cares?” “Except for I think somebody might see it,” Scher would reply. That small choice—to care about work other people thought wasn’t worth caring about—became something of a habit. “Even on some lower end piece of an identity project,” she said, “I always think, ‘somebody might see it.’” And eventually, somebody did. After two years in the “cootie department,” one of Scher’s ads caught the attention of an executive at Atlantic Records, who offered her a job designing album covers. She went on to create covers for artists including Bruce Springsteen and Eddie Harris, before CBS hired her back as East Coast Art Director for album covers. “So you could do it,” Scher said. “To not be a cootie, you have to walk around the block. And when you come back, you’re not a cootie any more.”
The Things That Change Your Life
In the very early days of Apple, Steve 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 invitation, scheduling the talk early enough that he could make it to 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.” Afterward, Jobs stayed around to speak with some of the students. On his way out, he spotted the young woman again in the parking lot. He walked over, asked if she would have dinner with him that Saturday, and they exchanged phone numbers. Then Jobs headed toward his car to drive to the dinner with his important customers. But as he walked, he started wondering which dinner was actually the important one. He turned around. “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 act on the seemingly small choice in front of you.
Uncovering The Elephant
In his essay, What’s going on here, with this human?, Graham Duncan, known as “the talent whisperer,” details his process for finding and hiring or partnering with talent. At its core, Duncan’s process is about trying “to see people more clearly.” It’s about uncovering the “elephant in the room.” When interviewing someone, the “elephant in the room” is all the things they don’t tell you about themselves—strengths, weaknesses, contradictions, insecurities, good and bad qualities they either deliberately withhold or simply aren’t fully aware of. “How,” Duncan was asked, “do you get at the elephant?” “You get at the elephant,” he said, “by doing references”—talking to people who have known and worked with them, looking for the small behaviors that recur across different situations. “Over time,” Duncan said, “you start to hear multiple people in different contexts mention versions of the same behavior repeated in similar contexts, and you go, ‘Oh, that’s a pattern. That’s a pattern of behavior.’” Those patterns, Duncan believes, are often more revealing than the résumé, the interview, or the person’s own account of who they are. “Past behaviors,” he said, “are indicative of future behaviors.”
Becoming Accident-Prone
There’s a quote that circulates Zen and spiritual communities in various forms. Its exact origins are hard to trace. The philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti: “Enlightenment is an accident, but some activities make you accident prone.” Shunryu Suzuki: “Gaining enlightenment is an accident. Spiritual practice simply makes us accident-prone.” Suzuki’s student Richard Baker: “Enlightenment is an accident. Meditation makes you accident prone.” A modern Zen teacher and author, James Ishmael Ford: “Awakening is always an accident…But certain practices can help us become accident-prone.” Big things are an accident. The small choices make you accident-prone.