Do Not Fight The Last War
In his book The 33 Strategies of War, Robert Greene uses the phrase “fighting the last war” to describe the tendency to get stuck repeating old patterns, strategies, approaches, ways of thinking, and so on. In warfare, a general who carries the tactics from a previous battle into the next—without considering changes in technology, terrain, or the enemy—is said to be fighting the last war, a critique of their failure to adapt to present realities and circumstances. In civilian life, Greene writes, “What most often weighs you down and brings you misery is the past, in the form of unnecessary attachments, repetitions of tired formulas, and the memory of old victories and defeats. You must consciously wage war against the past and force yourself to react to the present moment…Do not repeat the same tired methods. Sometimes you must force yourself to strike out in new directions…Apply no tactic rigidly…Attack problems from new angles, adapting to the landscape and to what you’re given.”
Striking out in new directions, attacking problems from new angles, not repeating the same tired methods, not fighting the last war—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
Put ‘Em Anywhere You Want
Around the time Jerry Seinfeld was starting out in comedy, many broadcast television companies and radio networks began formally banning the use of curse words. Some comedians were outraged. Attached to memory of old comedians who got to use curse words, some comedians refused to adapt and fit their material to the new territory, Seinfeld said, so they didn’t survive in the business. “But the rest of us went, ‘Ok. I still wanna play—I’ll play by the new rules…I’ll get around that.’” It’s like slalom skiing, Seinfeld continues: “I always say, ‘If I’m Lindsey Vonn, I don’t care where you put the gates on the mountain. Put ‘em anywhere you want. I’m going to make the gates.’” “Culture is a liquid—it’s always changing, always moving, always taking a slightly different shape,” he continues, “you have to feel it and work with it…That’s the job.”
You Just Can’t Keep Doing The Same Thing
The music producer Rick Rubin was recently talking with the members of a band whose previous album featured a massive hit single. At the time of the conversation with Rick, they were working on the next album. “And when they came to see me,” Rick told me, “they said, ‘We know what the first single is going to be on this album. It has to be the first single because it uses the same chords as our last single and that was a hit.’” In the same chapter as the one I quoted from above, Robert Greene writes about this instinct to repeat what’s worked: “Something that has worked for us before becomes a doctrine…Repetition replaces creativity.” Rick said to the band, “If it’s the same chords as your last single, not only can it not be the first single, it can’t even be on the album. You did that. There’s no reason to do that again. You already did that.” He told me he’s been having similar conversations, encouraging the artist’s he works with to resist fighting the last war, since he started producing albums out of his college dorm room in the early 1980s. “ I don’t know how I knew it,” he said. “It came very instinctively to me that you just can’t keep doing the same thing. I guess I know because as a fan, if you keep doing the same thing, I’m not interested.”
This Ain’t Gonna Work.
Years into struggling to land acting jobs, in 1988, Matt Damon auditioned for Dead Poets Society. Again, he didn’t get it. Soon after, he got a summer job at The Janus Cinema, a single-screen movie theater in his hometown. “It played 1 fucking movie the entire summer,” Damon said: Dead Poets Society. “So, you go from the possibility of being in the movie to the guy wearing a maroon vest and black bow tie, tearing the ticket, and watching people come out crying because they’re so moved by the movie. It was like, ‘Wow, that’s the range of possibility for you if you go into that business.’” Damon persisted on the auditioning circuit, and over the next few years, he landed small roles—appearing as an uncredited baseball fan in Field of Dreams (1989), a student in School Ties (1992), and in a non-speaking role as former El Rancho housemate Edgar Pudwhacker in Glory Daze (1995). In 1995, he auditioned for the part of Aaron Stampler in Primal Fear. From years of experiencing the cycle of reading a script, auditioning, getting rejected, watching the movie release, and observing its impact on the actors’ careers—over time, Damon developed an instinct for recognizing when something had real potential to be a break-out role. After reading the Primal Fear script, he said, “I spent money I didn’t have on a dialect coach because it was clear that whoever got that role was going to blow up.” Edward Norton got the role. Selected over 2,000 other prospects, Norton made his acting debut, a break-out performance for which he won a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor and an Academy Award nomination in the same category. After watching Norton’s rise, Damon decided to strike out in a new direction, attacking the problem of landing an acting job from a new angle. “I knew there wasn’t going to be many more of those roles to come around,” he said. “It was like, ‘What are the odds that a movie with that good a role is going to make it all the way through the ranks of known actors, and then get thrown to the wolves, and then after all of us fight for that scrap, one of us gets it? This ain’t gonna work. I got to do my own thing.’” “That was really the impetus behind Ben [Affleck] and I writing Good Will Hunting…We wrote that movie specifically because we wanted the parts as actors.”
I Can Choose Something Else. I Must Choose Something Else.
At just 6 years old, Andre Agassi was on national television being hailed as a tennis prodigy. By 7, he was dominating tournaments around the country. At 13, he was sent to an elite tennis academy. At 16, he dropped out of the school to turn pro, and when he did, the expectations were that Agassi would win Grand Slams, climb the rankings, claim the No. 1 ranking in the world, and go down as one of the greatest tennis players in history. But, by the early 1990s, six years into his career, he still hadn’t won a Grand Slam, his world ranking had plummeted, and it looked like those lofty predictions had completely unraveled. His long-time coach dropped him without even telling Agassi, who learned the news while sipping his morning cup of coffee and flipping through USA Today. Forced to strike out in a new direction, Agassi asked his manager, Perry Rogers, to find him a new coach. Rogers had recently read a book titled Winning Ugly by Brad Gilbert and thinks Gilbert would be perfect. He arranges a meeting at an Italian restaurant, Café Porte Chervo, one of Agassi’s favorites. Rogers kicked things off: “So, listen, Brad, one reason we wanted to meet with you is, we want to get your take on Andre’s game…We’d like you to tell us what you think.”
Gilbert was confused, “You want to know what I think of his game?”
“That’s right,” Rogers said.
“You want me to be honest?” Gilbert asked.
“Please.”
“Brutally honest?”
“Don’t hold back.”
Gilbert takes an enormous swallow of his beer and “commences a careful, thorough, brutal-as-advertised summary of my flaws as a tennis player,” Agassi writes. Brad says that Agassi’s problem, “the problem that threatens to end my career prematurely,” is that he’s still playing the way he played when he was dominating tournaments as a teenager. What got him to the pros doesn’t work in the pros, Brad says. “You try to hit a winner on every ball.” And when his all-or-nothing style inevitably puts him in a hole, Agassi makes no adjustment—he tries to hit even more perfect winners on every ball—and only digs himself deeper. Instead, Brad says, “stop thinking about yourself, and your own game, and remember that the guy on the other side of the net has weaknesses. Attack his weaknesses.”
After fifteen minutes of delivering his brutal honest thoughts without interruption, Brad got up and went to the bathroom. Agassi turned to Rogers, “that’s our guy.” With Brad as his new coach, Agassi changes his game. “I respond to Brad’s ideas,” he writes. “I find peace in his claim that…I can choose something else. I must choose something else.”
Adapting to Brad’s methods took some time. Agassi lost a couple tournaments and entered the 1994 U.S. Open unseeded. He reached the finals where he faced Michael Stich, recent Wimbledon Champion and number 4 seed who has a weakness: his forehand. Throughout the final, Agassi writes, “I hear Brad’s voice, as clearly as if he were standing behind me. Go for his forehand. When in doubt, forehand, forehand. So I hit to Stich’s forehand. Again and again he misses.” Agassi wins in straight sets. “I fall to my knees. My eyes fill with tears.” The first unseeded player in 28 years to win the U.S. Open, Agassi would go on to win the Australian Open, and after winning back-to-back Grand Slams, he claimed the No. 1 ranking in the world.
The Lost Generation
Throughout her career, the graphic designer Paula Scher has repeatedly struck out in new directions, attacked problems from new angles, not repeated the same tired methods, not fought the last war. She reinvented typography as a visual element, rather than just text, creating dynamic designs for institutions like The Public Theater and MoMA. During a disruptive period of transition in the music industry—from albums to records to CDs—she evolved and created striking covers for artists like Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, blending music and visual art in fresh ways. She consistently adapted to new technologies while maintaining her distinctive style, expanding into environmental design with large-scale, immersive graphics. When asked about her ability to regularly innovate and set trends, Scher summed up her approach throughout her career like this: “There was a condition, and I responded to the condition…In the end, a person has to be able to adapt to the conditions of their present circumstances.” She told a story about “the lost generation”—a group of designers who resisted changing their ways during the transition to digital tools in the late 1980s and 1990s. As a result, they didn’t make it in the field “because they wouldn’t adapt to the change.” Because they wanted to fight the last war.