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Most modern knowledge work organizations treat individuals as general-purpose computers that execute a turbulent mixture of value-producing and administrative tasks—often unequally distributed, and not at all optimized for any particular big picture objective.

— Cal Newport ¹

It is the most incredible moment in sports that no one talks about. ²

Michael Jordan’s first six seasons with the Chicago Bulls created speculation: will Michael Jordan be the greatest NBA player to never win a Championship? Jordan was a bonafide superstar and, after the rookie signed a sneaker deal with Nike, the biggest name in pro sports. But despite all their talent, the late ‘80s’ Bulls had back to back to back losing seasons, three head coaching firings, and were twice swept in the first of the playoffs. ³

Then in 1988, things looked to be coming together. Jordan led the league in scoring. Scottie Pippen was emerging as the superhero’s sidekick. The Bulls ended the regular season 47-35 and knocked off two favored opponents in the first and second rounds of the playoffs. But then, they lost to the Detroit Pistons in the Conference Finals. And after one of the best seasons in franchise history, head coach Doug Collins was fired.

He was replaced with Jordan’s fourth coach, Phil Jackson, who led the 1989 Bulls back to the Conference Finals where, again, they lost to the Pistons. After back to back to back appearances in the Conference Finals, expectations for the 1990 Bulls were high. But on December 19, 1990, after a 21-point loss to the Pistons, the Bulls were sitting in ninth place in the conference, out of playoff contention.

The following day, Phil Jackson announced, and the Chicago Tribune reported, “The Bulls have named center Bill Cartwright a co-captain along with Michael Jordan, who had held the job by himself.”

In his eleventh season, Cartwright was, to many, a stunning choice for co-captain. Medical Bill, as some teammates referred to him (because he was always nursing some injury or another), played in just four games the season before he joined the Bulls. He didn’t score a lot of points, was good but not great at defense, didn’t say a whole lot, and always looked kind of sad. He wasn’t a paragon of leadership.

But the moment Bill Cartwright was named co-captain was the moment the Bulls became a championship team. As Sam Walker, author of Captain Class, said, “If you looked at the numbers, just purely the numbers and asked, what’s the moment the Bulls became a championship team? You would point to that day. It was that day. It’s clear as a bell.”

The Bulls didn’t lose another game that December, winning twelve of their next thirteen games. Then after 11- then 9-game winning streaks, they finished first place in their conference with a franchise-best 61-21 record. After sweeping the Knicks in the first round of the playoffs and knocking off the 76ers in just five games in the second round, the Bulls swept the Pistons in the Conference Finals. They lost game 1 against the Lakers then won the next four to win the 1991 NBA Finals.

Which brings me to the productivity puzzle.

In Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences, the writer and historian of technology and culture Edward Tenner seeks the answer to a “productivity puzzle”: why has the advancement in workplace technology not been reflected by an advancement in workplace productivity? “Intuitively,” Tenner writes, “it is hard to believe that huge investments in improving the quality of anything will not pay off in the long run.” ⁴

But here are the stats. The economist Stephen Roach found that in a nine-year period in which the service sector increased investment in advanced technology by over 116 percent, workers’ output increased by only 2.2 percent. Two other economists from the Brookings Institution and the Federal Reserve, Tenner writes, “calculated the contribution of computers and peripherals as no more than 0.2 percent of real growth in business output.”

The explanation for this puzzle is what Tenner calls a “rearranging effect.” Technology made secretarial and managerial tasks easy enough that, technically, intellectual specialists could do them. So, figuring computers were essentially a tool making it possible for a smaller number of people to accomplish the same amount of work, companies en masse laid off support staff.

In 2009, the entrepreneur and tech investor Paul Graham wrote an influential essay on makers and managers. In it, he argues that the best types of workflows for makers (e.g. programmers and writers) are different than the best workflows for managers. Essentially, makers need large chunks of time where there are no interruptions, no meetings looming, and no expectations on their responsiveness. They need to be able to sharply point their focus at a singular attention target. Therefore, makers, Graham writes, “prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.” ⁵

When the support staff is eliminated, makers have to absorb the secretarial and managerial tasks. They have to orphan the makers workflow and adopt the managers workflow. They need to be able to diffuse their focus at many attention targets. They have meetings and calls looming. Large chunks of time are shattered by daily barrages of emails and Slack notifications and calendar alerts and ad hoc requests. Tenner cites the research of Peter G. Sassone, who “concluded that computerization has helped reduce rather than promote the amount of time that these employees spend performing their highest and best work.”

Attention is a zero-sum game. When you are attending to the execution or facilitation of quotidian tasks, you are not attending to the production of valuable bottom-line-boosting work. So, it takes a larger number of makers to accomplish the same amount of work. But a company that won’t hire support staff probably won’t hire more makers. So overall organizational productivity declines. Sassone says this is an inevitable result of the “law of diminishing specialization.” ⁶

“Economic theory suggests,” Tenner writes, “the most rational way to deploy staff is to have the most skilled and specialized employees working as much of the time as possible at the highest level of specialization.” People who study productivity in the business sector refer to this as intellectual specialization, which says: you want your skilled specialists to spend more time focusing on work that creates value for your organization and less time on work that doesn’t. You want to makers making and the managers managing. In his book A World Without Email, techno-philosopher Cal Newport references the example economics textbooks use to illustrate the idea of efficient labor markets: though a great lawyer could also be her own typist, she’d be a fool to not hire a typist. If she bills $500 an hour and a typist costs $50 an hour, she’s clearly better off outsourcing whatever she can to spend more time on legal work.

In our expanding jobs ⁷, the work once divided among two or three workers has crawled onto a single worker’s plate. We’re the lawyer and the typist, the maker and the manager, the Jordan and the Cartwright. As an inevitable result, despite spilling work into all hours of the day and week, like Jordan and the late ‘80s’ Bulls, we’re not producing the first-class work we know we’re capable of.

In 1986, Richard Hamming gave a talk at his former employer, Bell Labs, on how to do first-class work. In mathematics and computer science arenas, Hamming is one of the all-time giants. The talk was informed by his observing and collaborating with Nobel Prize winners, interviewing the great scientists of his time, and studying the great scientists of all time. “Most of you in this room,” Hamming said, “probably have more than enough brains to do first class work. But great work is something else than mere brains.” ⁸

Hamming tells the story of a fellow with mere brains. “He took me into his office and showed me his method of getting letters done and how he took care of his correspondence,” Hamming says. “He was bragging about how marvelous it was and how he could get so much work done without the secretary’s interference.” He was bragging about being the maker and the manager and, as we’ve said and as Hamming told him, you have to be a fool to not use your manager. If you only work on what only you can work on while the support takes over the rest of the work, Hamming told him, you will go much farther.

“And, he never went any further,” Hamming writes. “[He] was not willing to recognize that you need the support.”

Jordan recognized it. He recognized that being an elite captain is a full-time job. As Sam Walker describes the job, “The captain is the figure who holds sway over the dressing room by speaking to teammates as a peer, counseling them on and off the field, motivating them, challenging them, protecting them, resolving disputes, enforcing standards, inspiring fear when necessary, and above all setting a tone with words and deeds.”

When Jordan was freed from having to attend to the tasks of a captain, Walker said, that’s when the Bulls became a first-class team. “That’s when Jordan became great—when he was allowed to be the star and someone else was taking care of the duties of management.”

“Without Bill Cartwright,” Walker writes, “it’s not clear Jordan would have won anything.” “Bill,” Jordan would add, “made all the difference.”

To do first-class work, Hamming says, “you don’t let anything else get the center of your attention.” You don’t try to be the scientist and the secretary, the lawyer and the typist, the maker and the manager, the Jordan and the Cartwright. ⁹ ¹⁰

Or if you do, as Graham said, “understand the cost.”

[1] A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload by Cal Newport

[2] Sam Walker: Author, the Captain Class

[3] The Captain Class: The Hidden Force That Creates the World’s Greatest Teams by Sam Walker

[4] Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences by Edward Tenner

[5] Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule by Paul Graham

[6] Office productivity: the impacts of staffing, intellectual specialization and technology by Peter G. Sassone

[7] The Expanding Job by Anne Helen Peterson

[8] You And Your Research by Richard Hamming

[9] After a six-year study of twenty departments at five major U.S. corporations, Peter G. Sassone found that these organizations could immediately reduce their staffing costs by 15 percent by hiring more support staff and freeing up their professionals to produce more bottom-line-boosting work.

[10] “When you allow specialists to work with more focus, they produce more, and this extra value can more than compensate for the cost of maintaining dedicated support. Our rush to cut payrolls by having everyone handle their own administrative work through computer interfaces provided only the illusion of streamlining. These top-line numbers obscured the degree to which the cognitive gears that produce value in knowledge work began to grind and stick under these new demands. Returning to a culture that allows more separation between specialized and administrative work is crucial.” — Cal Newport, A World Without Email

Thank you to Greg Shildkrout and Katie McKenzie for reading drafts of this.

Of all the people I’ve never met, Cal Newport has shaped my life the most.

When I question my career trajectory, I return to Cal’s ideas on building career capital and thinking like a craftsman and becoming so good you can’t be ignored.

When I feel overwhelmed with my workload or underwhelmed with my work output, I return to Cal’s ideas on deep work and sequential processing and embracing boredom.

When I sense I’m not realizing the full potential of my time and attention, I return to Cal’s ideas on solitude and high-quality leisure and attention residue.

The problem is that Cal proves his ideas work. Despite (or, he might say, as a consequence of) his day job as a theoretical computer scientist, he’s prolific: seven books, thousands of articles, podcast episodes, podcast appearances, and on and on, and counting. So when I want to return to his ideas or when I often find myself wanting to suggest his work to others, I don’t know where to tell us to start.

So this page** will be the destination for when I need to return to Cal’s ideas and (I hope) for when others need somewhere to start with Cal’s work. Let’s start with passion…

Don’t Follow Your Passion

People who give the advice to “follow your passion” are often far removed from the complex origins of their occupational happiness. They didn’t simply find a job that matched to a pre-existing passion. The social science research shows that most people don’t have pre-existing passions.

In So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Cal cites the research of organization psychologist Amy Wrzesniewski. Wrzesniewski found that people identify their work one of the three ways: a job (a way to pay the bills), a career (a path to increasingly better work), or a calling (a vital part of their life/identity). To explore what leads people to experience work as a calling, Wrzesniewski studied college administrative assistants—a group you’d expect would, by and large, experience their work the same. Surprisingly, there was about an even split in how these employees identified with their work. And the strongest predictor of experiencing work as a calling, of loving what they do, was the number of years worked. Passion, in other words, follows. It’s a byproduct, a side effect, spun out of a complex web of elements that are agnostic to the specific type of work a job requires. Competence, autonomy, connection, a sense of accomplishment, a sense of usefulness, a sense of continual improvement—these are some of the ingredients in the concoction that makes up a compelling career. How do you get them?

Understand The Economics of Great Jobs

When you get concrete about the traits that make a great job great, you can’t escape the reality that, like passion, it takes time to get a great job. (More time than those who subscribe to the “follow your passion” advice stick around before job-hopping, continuing their relentless search for the thing they were meant to do). Some creative freedom, impact, control over what you do and when you do it and who you do it with—these are some of the traits people want (and people who love what they do have) in their job.

In a word, valuable—the traits that define a great job are valuable. How do you acquire something valuable? “Basic economic theory tells us,” Cal writes in So Good They Can’t Ignore You, “you need something rare and valuable to offer in return—this is Supply and Demand 101.” In classic economic terms, to get valuable traits in your working life, you must offer something valuable in return. Skills. In exchange for the valuable traits that define great work, you need valuable skills (what Cal refers to as “career capital”) to offer in return. This gives us a clear focus…

Trust The Persistent Acquisition of Career Capital

Cal’s philosophy around crafting a compelling career is rooted in the advice nobody took from one of the most wildly successful comedians/performers/entertainers of all time, Steve Martin. Reading Martin’s Born Standing Up very powerfully crystallized something in my brain: the prize never goes to the person who shows up with the most talent, it goes to the person who sticks around longest. “Despite a lack of natural ability,” Martin writes, he would go on to put together one of the most decorated careers in the history of entertainment (five Grammy Awards, an Emmy Award, a couple of Lifetime Achievement Awards, an Honorary Oscar, and so on and so on). Someone stood up in an audience once and asked, how do you become successful? “You have to become undeniably good at something,” he said. “Nobody ever takes my advice, because it’s not the answer they wanted to hear…but I always say, ‘Be so good they can’t ignore you.’”

In Cal’s terminology: acquire a lot of career capital. There was a fourteen-year stretch where you probably would have seen Martin as a failing stand-up comedian, while, as Cal would see it, “he carefully and persistently gathered career capital, confident that valuable skills would translate into valuable opportunities.” With this trust in the persistent acquisition of career capital, “fame fell on me as a by-product,” Martin writes. “The course was more plodding than heroic: I did not strive valiantly against doubters but took incremental steps…I was not naturally talented,” he repeats. What’s interesting is that Martin is of an era in which he couldn’t have conceived of fame potentially falling on his lap for doing what he was doing. He was doing it for the sake of doing it. He had…

Adopt The Craftsman Mindset

Is this what I’m really meant to do? Do I love this? What do I truly love? If you’re asking these kinds of questions, you’re looking for worth and for quality and for meaning and for a sense of satisfaction, and you’re expecting to find their source in you. But, Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly write in All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age (an influence throughout the “Deep Work Is Meaningful” chapter in Cal’s Deep Work), “the fact of the matter is out in the world.”

For most of human history, you didn’t have a job, you had a craft or a trade. You were a carpenter or a blacksmith or a mason or a potter or a sculptor or a shoemaker. And you found the source of meaning and satisfaction just about everywhere but in you. “The task of the craftsman,” Cal writes that Dreyfus and Kelly wrote, “is not to generate the meaning, but rather to cultivate in himself the skill for discerning the meanings that are already there.” To the craftsman, wherever there is a choice between doing it well or doing it poorly, there is an opportunity for meaning. Because anything—however lowly, however noble—done well is satisfying. “You don’t need a rarified job,” Cal writes in Deep Work, “you need a rarified approach to your work.”

Work Deeply

When a craftsman is performing their craft, they are in a state of what Cal calls deep work. When a blacksmith is forging their metal, when a wheelwright is working their wood, when a stonemason is shaping their stone, they are in a distraction-free depth of concentration. This state of unbroken concentration is intrinsic to activities in which you’re physically occupied in producing something concretely through manual skill.

When we shift our focus from traditional craftsmanship to the modern world of knowledge work, deep work is no longer a naturally slipped-into state. Instead, it is a skill calling out to be cultivated and cared for. And I’m not sure one can read Deep Work in earnest and not decide firmly to want to answer that call. Producing at a peak level, learning hard things, making creative insights, creating things that matter—these all follow from extended periods of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration. To cultivate and amplify the ability to go deep, Cal writes, “is to leverage the complex machinery of the human brain in a way that maximizes the meaning and satisfaction you’ll associate with your life.” In the way a baseball batter cultivates the ability to go long by strengthening their physical muscles away from the ballpark, a knowledge worker cultivates the ability to go deep by strengthening their mental muscles away from the workplace…

Treat Your Brain Like An Athlete Treats Their Body

You can get in shape and fall out of shape. You can gain and lose muscle. You can help and hurt your body’s ability to perform at a high level. And a serious athlete hardly does anything without considering how it might help or hurt their body’s ability to perform at a high level. Their eating, drinking, sleeping, weight training, conditioning, recovery, recreational, and you-name-it habits are formed and maintained to enhance athletic performance.

A similar seriousness is required of those who want to extract as much value as possible from their brain. Because an important reality about deep work is that you can get in cognitive shape and fall out of cognitive shape, you can gain and lose mental muscle, you can help and hurt your brain’s ability to concentrate at a high level. The second half of Deep Work is all about “how to take advantage of this reality” with habits of mind that enhance cognitive performance. In my experience, the most helpful, simplest, and hardest is to…

Train Your Brain To Tolerate Boredom

Every morning, when we get back from a walk, before I say “food” or grab his bowl, my dog starts drooling. Drool is a reflex—he can’t control it. I’ve conditioned him to create a connection: walking through the door after a walk means food is coming soon. This is what’s known as Pavlovian Conditioning, named after Ivan Pavlov and his experiments with dogs, which illuminated the mechanics of the human brain. As Pavlov told a journalist after winning the 1904 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, “That which I see in dogs, I immediately transfer to myself, since, you know, the basics are identical.”

If you’ve ever reflexively reached for your phone for relief from even a moment of boredom or cognitive challenge, you’ve created a Pavlovian connection: the absence of novel stimuli (one definition of boring) means novel stimuli (one definition for much of what is on your phone) is coming soon. In the way I’ve rewired my dog’s brain by relieving his drool with food every time we get back from a walk, Cal writes in Deep Work, “If every moment of potential boredom in your life—say, having to wait five minutes in line or sit alone in a restaurant until a friend arrives—is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain has likely been rewired.” You are Pavlovian Conditioned to not tolerate the absence of stimuli or novelty (one definition of deep work). You are cognitively conditioned to not do deep work. To help your brain’s ability to concentrate at a high level, you must train it to tolerate boredom. You must rewire it to be OK in the absence of novel stimuli. Sometimes, when you start to reach for your phone, before you relieve that mental drool, you must catch yourself and say, as I daily do, “No, the absence of novel stimuli does not always mean novel stimuli is coming soon.” “Minimizing the number of times you give in to distraction,” Cal writes, “can be understood analogously as [strengthening] the mental muscles.” And speaking of minimizing…

Minimize Attention Target Switches

You are concentrating on a task then in a moment of cognitive challenge, you click the email icon for just a quick check of your inbox. There’s an email with a reminder of that call you agreed to jump on, there’s an email with a new assignment/obligation, and an email with an irrelevant notification from LinkedIn. After just a quick check, you bring your attention back to the task. A few minutes in, you realize your attention is divided: while trying to focus on the task, your mind is also writing potential replies to get out of that call or cursing that new assignment dropped on you or wondering what you did that led LinkedIn to believe you might be a good fit for that Pharmaceutical Sales Representative job in Missouri.

This psychological effect has a name: attention residue. When you switch your attention from one target (task) to another (inbox), there’s a cognitive cost: a “residue” of your attention doesn’t make the switch. Every time you shift from attention target to attention target, you’re reducing your cognitive capacity. “If, like most,” Cal writes in a blog post about attention residue and the classic arcade game, Snake, “you rarely go more than 10 – 15 minutes without a just check, you have effectively put yourself in a persistent state of self-imposed cognitive handicap. The flip side, of course, is to imagine the relative cognitive enhancement that would follow by minimizing this effect.”* I have it written on a notecard where I can see it when I need to: try to minimize residue-slathering attention target switches. Now, let’s switch our attention to a target to try to maximize…

*One of Cal’s solutions to the problem of attention residue: time blocking.

Free Your Mind From Input From Other Minds

Unlike unidirectional processes such as time, the brain has bidirectional capability. But the brain, at its best, works in a sequential, unidirectional way. It’s like a one-way street but that can pivot 180* in a fraction over an instant. One implication of this neural infrastructure is that every idea you’ve had, every discovery about yourself, every goal you’ve set, every word you’ve written, every decision you’ve made, every thought you’ve had—share something in common. That something: for some duration—however brief or long, however fragmented or sustained—your mind was free of inputs from other minds. You were in a state of solitude.

In Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, Cal borrows this definition of solitude from the book Lead Yourself First, coauthored by U.S. Circuit Judge Raymond Kethledge and former army officer Michael Erwin. When we think of solitude, we think: a state of physical isolation. Really, solitude has little to do with where the body happens to be and has everything to do with what’s happening in the brain. Solitude is, here’s Cal, “a subjective state in which your mind is free from input from other minds.” Solitude means you’re not processing input from someone else’s mind. If you are alone, in a cabin, in the Australian Outback, listening to a podcast—not solitude. If you are walled in, on a city subway, by a rip-roaring little league baseball team fresh off a win over their crosstown-rival, journaling—solitude. Though solitude can be accessed on demand, so can smartphones and podcasts and audio books and YouTube videos and etc. “It’s now possible to completely banish solitude from your life,” Cal writes before compellingly/alarmingly detailing the ill-effects of “chronic solitude deprivation” and the alienation from our own minds. If you want to produce ideas, creative thoughts, some understanding of the self, some clarity of purpose, regular doses of solitude is a prerequisite. Through its fusion of mind and soul, “solitude is the school of genius,” Cal writes Edward Gibbon wrote. Solitude is a fundamental of human thriving. Procrastination, on the other hand, is not…

Know Why You’re Procrastinating

One of the reasons we Homo sapiens survived and other species of human didn’t is because of one crucial Homo sapiens’ adaptation: complex planning. This is unique to our human brain: it can come up with a plan or an idea, then it can think about it abstractly, then it can evaluate if it’s going to be successful or not, then it can decide to put energy/motivation into it or not. The example Cal always uses: the caveman has the idea to charge the mammoth and jump on its back and bash in its head with a rock. The brain goes, I don’t think that’s a reasonable plan, so I’m not going to make you feel motivated to do that. Then the caveman has the idea to sharpen a spear and throw it at the mammoth from a distance. The brain goes, I believe that could work, I’ll put some motivation behind that.

This still happens today. When you have some sort of busy work on your plate, until you feel like there is a threat—e.g. if I don’t get this done today, my boss is going to yell at me—of negative consequences, it can be hard to get the motivation. When you come up with some ambitious but arbitrary self-development initiative—e.g. I’m going to get up at 4:30 am every morning and work on my novel before work—it can be hard to sustain the motivation. Cal’s theory of procrastination is that when you procrastinate, your brain is calling you out. It believes that your idea or your plan is as unreasonable or haphazard an idea or plan as charging the mammoth with a rock. It is not convinced that the effort will lead to something positive in the future. So “procrastination is not a character flaw but instead a finely-tuned evolutionary adaptation,” Cal writes. “You shouldn’t lament procrastination, but instead listen to it. Treat it as a sign…[as] a constructive source of criticism — a voice from our paleolithic past telling us that although it likes our goals, we need to put a little bit more thought into how we’re going to get there.” If you want motivation or discipline or energy, convince your brain. That what you’re trying to accomplish is important. And that you have the right plan for accomplishing it. Speaking of energy…

Spend Energy To Have Energy

It’s a paradox (and so familiar from experience): your energy level is often proportional to your energy expenditure. After a relaxing vacation, you’re exhausted. After weeks in quarantine doing nothing, you’re exhausted. After a day idly watching Netflix and scrolling and tapping a screen, you’re exhausted. On the flip side: after a hard workout, you’re energized. After straining your brain with a good book, you’re energized. After practicing an instrument then a hike with your dog then a couple hours of deep work then cooking for and hosting some friends, you’re energized.

This intuition-reversing idea—that you have to spend energy to have energy—is what Cal calls The Bennett Principle, named after Arnold Bennett. In his short volume How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, Bennett zeroed in on the question of how one realizes the full potential of the hours outside of work. Essentially, bias towards mentally or physically strenuous activity. “What? You say that full energy given to those [non-working] hours will lessen the value of the business eight? Not so. On the contrary, it will assuredly increase the value of the business eight. One of the chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity; they do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change—not rest, except in sleep.” As Cal crystallizes: Prioritize demanding activity—“the value you receive from a pursuit is often proportional to the energy invested.”

Sources:

So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload

The Procrastinating Caveman: What Human Evolution Teaches Us About Why We Put Off Work and How to Stop

Deep Questions podcast

A Productivity Lesson from a Classic Arcade Game

**When I come across a useful idea from a new Cal book, article, podcast, etc., I update this page.

Thirteen years into his professional golfing career, Phil Mickelson hadn’t won one of the four major tournaments—The Masters, The U.S. Open, The Open Championship, or The PGA Championship. 

In those first thirteen years, Mickelson won twenty-two PGA Tour tournaments. That’s plenty to warrant the oft-asked question: will Phil Mickelson go down as “the best player to never win a major”? 

Before the 2004 season, Mickelson hired David Pelz, a NASA scientist turned putting instructor. Pelz had worked with golfers who had won ten major championships combined. 

“Phil called me,” Pelz recalls, “and said, ‘Can you help me lower my scores by one stroke in a major?’ And I said, ‘No one’s ever asked me that before.’” ¹ But then Pelz assured Mickelson that he could help him lower his scores. What he proposed surprised Mickelson. As Pelz saw it, it wasn’t with any technical or physical improvement that Mickelson was going to finally win a major. It would be “with better preparation.” 

So before the 2004 Masters, Mickelson and Pelz went to Augusta National, home of The Masters tournament. For four days—some eight to ten hours a day, Pelz had Mickelson hit shots from spots he was most likely to find himself in. “And then in the tournament,” Phil said, “if I was there, I’d already hit that shot over and over.” 

The goal with this kind of preparation, he said, was to make “the major course feel like my home course.” ² To get to the point where there wasn’t a spot on the course he wasn’t familiar or comfortable with. To be able to stay calm under pressure, to be able to hold on to a one stroke lead in a major. 

For nearly three decades, Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett has been studying the brain. In particular, her research is focused on unlocking where emotions—calmness, panic, happiness, anxiousness, nervousness, pleasantness, unpleasantness, and so on—come from and how they shape our lives. When I read her work, I couldn’t stop thinking about Mickelson’s final round in the 2004 Masters. 

We will come back to Phil on that Sunday in 2004 after a brief detour into the secret life of the brain. 

Dr. Barrett’s bestselling book, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain—gets its title from the discovery that emotions are constructed by the brain. 

We do not come hard-wired with the ability to feel calm and happy and anxious and nervous and so on. Everything we feel is cultivated in our environments and through our experiences. We are architects of our emotions. “Your river of feelings,” Dr. Barrett writes, “might feel like it’s flowing over you, but actually you’re the river’s source.” ³

Your brain constructs every sensation you experience. To understand how and why, consider your brain’s perspective. It’s trapped in your skull. It’s trapped in darkness, where it’s constantly receiving information from your sensory organs: your eyes, your ears, your nose, your skin, and your mouth. And, it’s constantly trying to make sense of that sensory data. To do so, it relies heavily, and sometimes entirely, on your past experiences. It sifts through it’s archives of experiences, looking for one that matches or nearly matches your present circumstances. “It combines bits and pieces of your past,” Dr. Barrett explains, “and estimates how likely each bit applies in your current situation.” 

The brain is constantly running probabilities and making predictions. It’s 86 billion neurons are constantly cascading with stimulation, constantly firing, constantly asking, what from our past is this present situation most analogous to? “These neural conversations,” Dr. Barrett writes, “try to anticipate [everything] that you will experience, and every action that you will take. These predictions are your brain’s best guesses of what’s going on in the world around you and how to deal with it…This efficient, predictive process is your brain’s default way of navigating the world, making sense of it, [and] initiating your body’s movements…Everything you feel is based on prediction from your knowledge and past experience.”

Each experience of emotion is a prediction, not a reaction. It is a blooming of seeds planted in your past. The Nobel laureate and neuroscientist Gerald M. Edelman referred to it as “the remembered past.” Some two thousand years before him, the philosopher Seneca advised a friend that if you don’t want to panic when the pressure is on, train before the pressure is on. ⁴

I now think of panicking in this way: panicking is your brain calling you out—you didn’t put in the work, the practice, the preparation. You didn’t form the experience for your brain to later use as a reference point. Without that reference point, as Dr. Barrett puts it, it’s like “swimming in a sea of uncertainty.” ⁵

When Mickelson spent four days at Augusta National practicing every shot imaginable, he was creating those reference points. He was forming the experiences his brain would later use to guide his present. He was seeding his brain to conjure calm. He was, on a neurological level, as he said, making the Masters feel like home.

He couldn’t have picked a better year for that level of preparation. The final round of the 2004 Masters turned out to be one of the great nail-biters in sports history. 

Mickelson was six under par and tied for first heading into the final round. After he made bogie on holes five and six and Ernie Els eagle’d the eighth hole, Mickelson dropped into second. Els shot another eagle on thirteen to take a two-stroke lead. And after he birdied on fifteen, the commentator said Els’ “got the Green Jacket by the collar.” ⁶

Meanwhile, Mickelson hit his driver down the middle of the fairway on the fourteenth hole. Before his second shot on fourteen, his caddie told him he needed a birdie to stay in it. “I had 146 yards,” Phil said after, “and with the hours I spent with Dave Pelz, getting the yardages down, I knew that I had to take 7 yards off my pitching wedge.” ⁷ His shot landed about 10 yards from the hole, checked up, rolled just past the cup, and stopped six inches away. He tapped in for a birdie and was one stroke back from Els. 

Els held the lead when he was teeing off on the eighteenth hole while Mickelson was teeing off on the par-3 sixteenth hole. Phil hit his eight-iron about twenty feet from the hole.

“As I was walking up to the green,” he said, “I really thought that it didn’t feel overwhelming. I thought, ‘I’ll make this putt and I’ll birdie one of the last two holes.’” 

He sunk the putt. He and Els were tied. Els tapped in a par putt on the eighteenth hole and then went to the practice green to get some reps before, presumably, a playoff. Mickelson hit a 3-wood off the tee that landed in the middle of the fairway on the eighteenth hole. He had 162 yards to the pin. He hit an eight-iron. The ball landed six feet to the right of the pin and rolled to leave Phil with another twenty-foot putt. This one, to win his first ever Major.

Mickelson putts the ball. The ball travels toward the hole. It’s looking good. “Is it his time?” the commentator asks. The ball catches the left lip, circles around the cup, and falls in the hole. “Yes! At long last!” the commentator answers.

“It’s nice,” Mickelson said after, “not to ever have to hear all that stuff about being the best player to never win a major.” ⁸

Because of the preparation, he said, “I had a different feeling entering this tournament. I felt very calm.” ⁹ It was his brain saluting him—you put in the work, the practice, the preparation.

Sources:

[1] Dave Pelz, tell us exactly what Phil Mickelson’s Pelz swing is? by Malachy Clerkin

[2] Visualize Your Victory With Phil Mickelson

[3] How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett

[4] Letters From A Stoic by Seneca

[5] Seven And A Half Lessons About The Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett

[6] 2004 Masters Official Film

[7] Sports of The Times; A Sweet Victory, One That Went According to Plan by Dave Anderso

[8] Leap of Destiny: An Oral History Behind Mickelson’s Breakthrough Masters Win by Brian Wacker

[9] Calculated aggression yields masterful result for retooled Mickelson by Don Markus

Thank you to Joe Donohue, Greg Shildkrout, Katie McKenzie, and my Dad for reading drafts of this.

Before 1911, no human had successfully reached the South Pole, 90° 45’.

The Antarctic continent was discovered in 1820. And for the next eight decades, the great polar pioneers were trying for the pole. The first explicit attempt was in 1827. Ten years later, Royal Naval officer James Clark Ross set out on two ships, the Erebus and the Terror. Six weeks in, Ross reached the Antarctic ice shelf—“The Great Icy Barrier,” as Ross described it in his journal. At 78° 10’, Ross recorded that “we might with equal chance of success try to sail through the Cliffs of Dover, as penetrate such a mass,” and turned back. ¹

Two years after Ross, Sir John Franklin took command of the Erebus and the Terror. Franklin and a crew of 128 aimed to reach further south. None of them lived to tell their tale. 

This was the state of Polar exploration as two “rivals for the pole” found it in 1911. In November of that year, Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott set out in a race to be first to reach the South Pole. 

In The Last Place on Earth, Roland Huntford details their diametrically opposed approaches. Scott’s working pattern reflected “his own dour, self-punishing temperament,” Huntford writes. His plan was to push his crew to “keep up a steady grind hour after hour.” Scott set no particular number of miles or hours of travel per day. Just as many and for as long as possible. Unless a crew member got sick or injured. With his insisting on a level of “inhuman exertion,” Scott’s guys were hampered along the way by frostbite, dehydration, malnutrition, scurvy, snowblindness, hypothermia, intermittent paralysis, leg and ankle sprains, a dislocated shoulder, and worse of all, low morale. “We’re not a very happy party,” one of Scott’s crew members recorded. 

Amundsen, on the other hand, leaves the impression that his lifelong goal was to be the second human to the South Pole. He and his crew “were spending up to sixteen hours a day in their sleeping bags,” Huntford writes. Even on perfect weather days when the going was good and easy, “he would not allow the daily fifteen miles to be exceeded, and insisted on plenty of rest.” From his study of the expeditions that came before his, Amundsen came to believe in consistent moderate effort. “The heroic struggle that made such good reading,” he believed, “was in reality a warning.” 

While Scott’s crew was “struggling nine or ten hours a day,” Amundsen’s “had settled down to rhythm and unexciting regularity.” And so, with our rivals for the pole trekking along, here seems to be the perfect spot to leave them temporarily to talk about ice ages. 

I was surprised to learn that it was only in the early 19th century that humans began to conceive of the possibility that Earth was once covered by a sheet of ice. It began when French and European geologists and naturalists asked the question of massive granite boulders sitting three thousand feet up mountainsides in Switzerland: how could these possibly have gotten here? After the theory that floods carried the boulders was falsified by one geologist’s observation that all of Earth’s water couldn’t make such enormous objects float, the possibility of glaciation began percolating. ²

The term ice age was coined in 1837. And for the next six decades, the question slowly evolved from if the planet was ever frozen to how the planet became frozen. 

In the early 1900s, the expanding research became an unexpected interest of Serbian academic Milutin Milankovitch. Studying the cyclical changes in the shape of Earth’s orbit and angle of orientation to the Sun, Milankovitch wondered if the see-sawing between elliptical and circular orbits and/or the degree between Earth and Sun might explain the process of ice ages. 

It took some twenty years of drawing angles and computing solar radiation intensities and durations, but Milankovitch was right: ice age’s comings and goings depend on planetary wobble. I know what you’re now assuming: Earth tilts a degree or two away from the Sun, Earth gets less solar radiation, winters get extremely cold, ice sheets form then spread, few thousands and thousands of years later, ice age. Milankovitch assumed the same. 

Here, however, he was wrong. The ice age process is more subtle. 

In the 1920s, Russian-German meteorologist Wladimir Köppen discovered it is not extremely cold weather that causes ice ages. Rather, it is consistently cool weather. The process hinges on consistency across seasons. If it stays cool enough that this winter’s snow sticks around until next winter, sunlight rebounds off the snowy or icy reflective surface, perpetuating the cooling effect and increasing the odds that next-next winter’s snow accumulates, perpetuating…perpetuating, perpetuating, perpetuating. 

“The process is self-enlarging, unstoppable,” as John McPhee writes, “and once the ice is really growing it moves.” ³ Little by little, day by day, year by year, a little snow progresses into a planetary ice sheet. “It is not,” glaciologist Gwen Shultz explains, “the amount of snow that causes ice sheets but the fact that snow, however little, lasts.” ⁴ If a record snowfall winter is followed by a typical warm summer, all that snow will melt into ice age irrelevancy. 

Similarly, the amount of ground you cover in the short run, as Scott will prove, is irrelevant if you, in the long run, can’t last. Because progress is rarely a magnitude of intensity. Almost always, as Amundsen will prove, it’s a magnitude of consistency.

And on December 12, 1911, Amundsen and his team made it within forty-five miles of the South Pole—the closest any human had ever made it. “Going and surface as good as ever,” Amundsen journaled. “Weather splendid—calm with sunshine.” They could have made it to the Pole that day. They knew there was still the prospect of being beaten by Scott, but Amundsen reminded his crew: fifteen miles a day, no more, no less. On December 15, they woke up at dawn, had breakfast, packed up camp, then set out on their final fifteen. After about eight hours of seeing nothing but the endless white snowy horizon, Amundsen ordered, “Halt!” It was 3 PM. Amundsen looked at his compass: 90° 45’. “We are here as the first men,” one of the crew members recorded in his journal, “no English flag waves.” 

Thirty-four days later, the exhausted, sick, hungry, and injured Britains were greeted by a waving Norwegian flag. The trip home was worse. All five members of the team, Scott included, got frostbite then froze to death. 

Amundsen and his guys made the trip home to Norway without any issues at a pace of fifteen miles a day, no more, no less. “Bursting with health,” Huntford wrote, “by the way they moved, it would be hard to tell that they were just finishing off a journey of 1,400 miles in the harshest climate in the world for two months on end.” 

Kobe Bryant didn’t score a single point in his first basketball season. “I was terrible,” he said. “Awful.” When asked how he then went on to become one of the greatest basketball players of all time, he said, consistency. “I wasn’t the most athletic,” Kobe said. “So I had to look longterm…I had to say, ‘Ok, this year I’m going to get better at this. Next year, that. And patiently, I got better and better. It was piece by piece. It was the consistency of the work. The consistency of the work,” he stresses. “Monday, get better. Tuesday, get better. Wednesday, get better. You do that over a period of time—three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten years—you get to where you want to go.” ⁵ 

Whether it’s getting to the South Pole or freezing the planet over, getting in shape or writing a book, building a company, learning a new language, or perfecting your jump shot—progress is a magnitude of consistency. It’s not how hard you go today, tomorrow, and next week. It’s—when we check in on you in three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten years—are you still going?

“It’s simple,” Kobe said. “It’s simple math.” ⁶ No more, no less.

Sources:

[1] The Last Place on Earth by Roland Huntford

[2] A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

[3] In Suspect Terrain by John McPhee

[4] Ice Age Lost by Gwen Shultz 

[5] Kobe Bryant: ON How to be Strategic & Obsessive to Find Your Purpose

[6] Kobe Bryant: Mamba Mentality and The Mind of a Champion

Thank you to Greg Shildkrout and Katie McKenzie for reading drafts of this.

Bill Walsh revolutionized the passing game in the NFL because he had a quarterback who couldn’t pass.

In the 1960s NFL, passing the ball was barely a complement to running it. In 1960, for instance, there were 4,114 total passing attempts. That number has nearly quadrupled in today’s NFL. The boom began with an AFL expansion team, the Cincinnati Bengals. 

As an expansion team, the Bengals then offensive coordinator Bill Walsh said, “we got the dregs, players who never should have been in pro football.” But he got what he got, and his job asked much else but to make the most of what he got. So Walsh thought about how his Bengals offense might advance the football. In a league where offenses were built to run the ball, defenses were built to stop the run. Defensive players were big, strong, physical, and mean. The Bengals’ dregs were not, and so the Bengals were not going to have success running the ball, not through an NFL defense. 

The Bengals, it was clear to Walsh, had no option but to pass the ball. At the time, Walsh explains, “[everyone] thought if you weren’t throwing the ball twenty yards downfield, you weren’t throwing the ball.” If Walsh had a quarterback who could throw the ball twenty yards downfield, Walsh would have had him throw the ball twenty yards downfield. But Walsh had the dregs. His quarterback, Virgil Carter, couldn’t throw the ball twenty yards downfield. “Virgil,” Carter was once told, “if you want to throw the football more than twenty yards you better fill it with helium.” ¹ 

Coach Walsh, Virgil Carter, and the Bengals, in other words, had an inability unique from any other team in the NFL.

The late neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote more than a dozen books. They are filled with clinical tales artfully woven through the science and medicine discovery, history, framework, or paradigm necessary to understand and appreciate those tales. Before we return to Coach Walsh and Virgil Carter, I want to tell you one.

In March 1986, Sacks received a letter from a Mr. I. Two months earlier, Mr. I was knocked unconscious in a car accident. When he came to, Mr. I saw the world as it looks in black and white movies. Mr. I could not make color—not with his eyes, not in his mind’s eye, not in memory or when dreaming. You are or aren’t born with color-responding cells—to Sacks’ knowledge, no one could or had ever become totally colorblind.

The sense of loss would have been felt to some degree by anyone. It was intensely strangled by Mr I. A successful painter, Mr. I before could identify—by the name and number listed in the Pantone hue chart he long referenced when buying paint—the green of a billiards table or the yellow of a mustard. Now, he couldn’t make stop or go of a traffic light. 

Mr. I’s artistic sensibilities, his creative expression, his identity—his life—hinged on his unique ability to perceive color. That was lost and replaced with a unique inability. In everything and everyone, Mr. I saw a kind of statue of his inability. Chronically seeing what he could no longer see, Mr. I lived mostly in an “almost suicidal depression.”

Until he had an experience he’d later credit for his artistic and physical survival. He was driving one morning and over the highway, the sun was rising. It set in motion Mr I’s now-usual attempt to see what he couldn’t see: those glowing reds and oranges and yellows instead were smoldering blacks and grays and whites. What he would do to see the sunrise the way he once had, the way almost everyone does. But then, it happened. For the first time since the accident, Mr. I considered his new and unique inability. “Had anyone,” he thought, “ever seen a sunrise in this way before?” An exciting thought made increasingly more so by the realization of it’s transferability. Had anyone ever seen anything the way Mr. I could? 

The “apocalyptic” sunrise catalyzed Mr. I’s first black-and-white painting, Nuclear Sunrise, and his personal and professional resurrections. Now, in everyone and everything, Mr. I saw things no one else could. He saw textures and patterns embedded, and therefore invisible, in color. He saw shades, shapes, and silhouettes with a precision he couldn’t have before conceived. With it no longer cluttered by color, “my vision became that of an eagle—I can see a worm wriggling a block away. The sharpness of focus is incredible…I can read license plates at night from four blocks away.” He came to call his eyesight “privileged” because it allowed, no, forced him to see “a whole new world,” ushering in what became the most productive and celebrated “phase” of his artistic career. ² 

And so because Bill Walsh had to throw the ball with Virgil Carter, a quarterback who couldn’t throw the ball twenty yards downfield, he had to look at the game of football in ways no one before thought to. Instead of looking just at the field vertically, endzone to endzone, Walsh looked at it horizontally, sideline to sideline. Instead of looking just at a quarterback’s throwing power, Walsh looked at their accuracy, agility, and ability to make good decisions quickly and under pressure. Instead of looking just at a wide-receiver’s ability to catch the ball, Walsh looked at their ability to pick up yards after the catch.

Coalesced, Walsh saw then engineered an offensive playbook full of passes thrown to wide-receivers who ran precisely-timed routes to exacting spots on the field within twelve yards of Virgil Carter. “No helium was required,” Walsh later joked. In Carter’s first season, he averaged just 5.9 yards per passing attempt. In his second season, 7.3.

“People made fun of it,” Walsh said of his new short-pass system. “They called it a nickel-and-dime offense.” In 1970, the Bengals won the AFC Central Division. In 1971, Carter led the NFL in completion percentage.

After Cincinnati, Walsh took his system to San Diego. The Chargers quarterback led the league in completion percentage. After a year in San Diego, Walsh took the head coaching job at Stanford. In his first season, Stanford quarterback Guy Benjamin led the nation in passing. In Walsh’s second season, Benjamin’s replacement Steve Dils did the same. 

Next, Walsh took the head coaching job with the San Francisco 49ers. The 49ers had the league’s worst record and lowest payroll when Walsh got there. His new quarterback, Steve Deberg, was coming off a 1-10 season where he completed 45.4 percent of his passes. In his first season in Walsh’s system, Deberg threw and completed more passes than any quarterback in NFL history. After that season, the 49ers drafted Deberg’s replacement with their third round draft pick. It was a quarterback “who everyone said was too small and had too weak an arm to play in the NFL,” Michael Lewis writes in The Blind Side. It was Joe Montana. In Walsh’s system, Lewis continues, “[Montana] would become, by general consensus, the finest quarterback ever to play the game.” ³ 

In 1991, Montana gave way to Steve Young. Before he got to San Francisco, Young played two seasons in Tampa, where he went 3-16 as the starting quarterback. It would take seven seasons in San Francisco for Steve Young to lose 16 games. In 13 years with the 49ers, Young only lost 33 times. In Walsh’s system, Young led the NFL in passing five times, went to seven pro bowls, won two NFL MVP awards, three Super Bowls, and was a first-ballot Hall of Famer.

In the 80s, teams began to poach Walsh’s assistants to implement what was termed the “West Coast Offense” and by the mid-2000s, one General Manager would say, “Everyone in the NFL today runs Bill Walsh’s offense.”

“It all started,” Walsh said, “When I was forced to use Virgil.” When he was forced to look for “existing assets that only needed to be ‘seen’ and then capitalized on in new ways.” When he was forced to see a whole new game, ushering  in what became “one of the most dramatic changes in football [history].”

“Defects, disorders, diseases, in this sense, can play a paradoxical role,” Oliver Sacks writes, “by bringing out latent powers, developments, evolutions, forms of life, that might never be seen, or even be imaginable, in their absence.” 

Latent meaning already existing but waiting to be seen. Will you see it?

Sources:

[1] The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership by Bill Walsh

[2] An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales by Oliver Sacks

[3] The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game by Michael Lewis

Thank you to Greg Shildkrout and Katie McKenzie for reading drafts of this.