A Radical Model of Transformation
At the start of Leo Tolstoy’s Master and Man, Vasili Andreevich Brekhunov, a greedy and self-serving merchant, sets out with his servant Nikita on what should be a short horse-drawn sleigh ride to swindle someone out of a large sum of money. The two get lost in a snowstorm, eventually stopping on the side of the road to wait it out. Underdressed, Nikita gets hypothermia. Fixated on securing his money, Vasili unties the sleigh and rides off on the horse, leaving Nikita to die. In the blizzard, he rides in circles back to Nikita and the sleigh. “Vasili,” Tolstoy writes, “stood silent and motionless for half a minute. Then suddenly, with the same resolution with which he used to strike hands when making a good purchase, he took a step back and turning up his sleeves began raking the snow off Nikita,” ultimately laying on top of his servant to keep him warm enough to survive the freezing night. In this act “by which Vasili is transformed,” George Saunders writes in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, “his natural energy, which for so long had been used to benefit only himself, gets redirected. A defect becomes a superpower…Tolstoy is proposing something radical…transformation, when it happens, happens not through the total remaking of the person or the replacement of his habitual energy with some pure new energy but by a redirection of his (same old) energy…Say you’re a world-class worrier. If that worry energy gets directed at extreme personal hygiene, you’re ‘neurotic.’ If it gets directed at climate change, you’re an ‘intense visionary activist.’ We don’t have to become an entirely new person to do better; our natural energy just has to be turned in the right direction. We don’t have to swear off our powers or repent of who we are or what we like to do or are good at doing. Those are our horses; we just have to hitch them to the right, uh, sled.”
Redirecting our natural energy, transforming defects into strengths, hitching our horses to the right sled—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
It Was Because I Was Desperate
Tony Hawk was the first skateboarder to ollie into his aerial tricks, a move that fundamentally changed the sport. Before Hawk, aerials relied on momentum generated by ramps or transitions, limiting the tricks skaters could perform. By ollying into his tricks, Hawk opened the door to a new era of technical and stylish tricks that now define modern skating. “It wasn’t like I was trying to create a movement,” Hawk said. “It was because I was desperate.” It was because he was too small and too skinny “to get the inertia needed to get in the air like other skaters.” Hitching his defects to the right sled, Hawk transformed skateboarding forever.
I’m Done Condemning My Anxiety
Meg LeFauve was a very anxious kid. “My grandfather used to say that’s why I had curly hair,” she said, “because I worried so much.” And her dad called her “Moody Meg” “because I was very anxious. And it was this very negative thing to have anxiety.” Then as she got older, LeFauve started writing, wowing her teachers with her ability to write highly imaginative and original stories. Over time, LeFauve came to think that her creativity and her anxiety were hitched to the same sled—that her ability to write inventive stories was tied to the way her mind could also spin worries into overwhelming, catastrophic narratives. “It was when I started writing,” she said, “that I realized that I have a very big imagination. And that the downside of that is that anxiety can use your imagination too…That’s why I was a very anxious child: my imagination was just taking things and making, you know, cataclysmic stories all the time.” Instead of making cataclysmic stories all the time, LeFauve learned to redirect her natural energy in more productive directions, like writing the Pixar hit movies Inside Out and Inside Out 2, about the inner life of a girl named Riley, who learns to embrace the full spectrum of her emotions, appreciating that even those she once perceived as negative, like anxiety or fear, can be used to move her life in the right direction. “That’s what’s in the movie,” LeFauve said, “because that’s what happened to me…Like my anxiety—I’m done with being judgmental about my anxiety. I’m done with condemning her and saying that she should go away…I’m done with that because my anxiety is a very big part of why I am who I am and what I’ve been able to accomplish and give to the world.”
He’s Not Very Big, But He’s Very Smart
When he was 14, Wayne Gretzky moved from his small hometown to play in a more competitive hockey league in Toronto. He was undersized and during the first practice, he got pushed around. After practice, his coach pulled him aside. “When you go home tonight,” the coach said, “the Toronto Maple Leafs are playing the Philadelphia Flyers—watch Bobby Clarke play.” Bobby Clarke was an undersized player on the Flyers who went on to be inducted into the NHL Hall of Fame. “He’s not very big,” Gretzky’s coach told him, “but he’s very smart.” “And I studied him and I studied him and I studied him,” Gretzky said. “I would take out a piece of paper and draw a rink and then without looking at the paper, I’d watch the hockey game on TV, and I would take my pen and I’d follow the puck.” When Clarke got off the ice, Gretzky would look down at the paper and look for patterns. He began to notice two things. First, that Clarke “played the game mostly out of the corners.” Second, that players almost never went behind the net. Gretzky transformed his playing style, not through a total replacement of his defects but a redirection of them: on the ice himself, like Clarke, “I started playing out of the corner and from behind the net…I started using the net as a decoy. Consequently, I wasn’t standing in front of the net, getting knocked over, and being on my keister the whole time.” Consequently, he went on to set 61 NHL records—many of which he still holds—including most career regular-season goals (894), assists (1,963), and points (2,857).
It All Started When I Was Forced To Use Virgil
In 1968, Bill Walsh became the offensive coordinator of the Cincinnati Bengals. The Bengals were an expansion team, meaning their roster was filled with players other NFL teams didn’t want. And because he had a roster full of “comically inadequate players,” Walsh created a revolutionary NFL offense. In the late 1960s, NFL offenses were built to primarily run the football. To stop the run, defenses were full of big, strong, physical, and mean players. So, it was clear to Walsh: the newfound Bengals would have to rely on passing the ball. Here, there was another problem: Walsh’s quarterback, Virgil Carter, had a terrible arm. “Virgil,” Carter was once told, “if you want to throw the football more than 20 yards you better fill it with helium.” Redirecting Virgil’s defects, Walsh developed what is now known as The West Coast Offense: an offensive playbook full of passes thrown to wide-receivers who ran precise routes to exacting spots within 12 yards of Virgil Carter. “No helium was required,” Walsh joked. The West Coast Offense was immediately effective. In 1970, the Bengals won the AFC Central Division, and after a few years of consistent success, in 1979, Walsh became the head coach of the San Francisco 49ers—then the worst team in the NFL. With their third-round draft pick in the 1979 draft, the 49ers selected Joe Montana, 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: Evolution of a Game. In Walsh’s system, Lewis continues, “[Montana] would become, by general consensus, the finest quarterback ever to play the game.” In the early 1980s, other NFL teams began poaching Walsh’s assistant coaches, and by the mid-2000s, one General Manager said, “Everyone in the NFL today runs Bill Walsh’s offense.” “It all started,” Walsh said, “When I was forced to use Virgil.”
Play To Your Anatomical Strengths And Weaknesses
When the musicians John Mayer and Cory Wong got together to play guitar, Mayer interrupted Wong while he was rapidly strumming and asked, “Could you keep doing that all day? You could keep doing that all day, right?” Yes, Wong says. “Amazing,” Mayer says. “Here’s what I want to talk about. I watched you play a bunch online.” As Mayer watched videos of Wong playing, he said he watched Wong’s right hand—his strumming hand. “You have an anatomy thing working for you with your right hand,” Mayer said. “Your right hand is shaped in a way—you have long fingers, very sinewy hands—that allows you to play like that.” Wong leans in to his anatomical strengths and weaknesses, Mayer says. “And I wish more players would embrace finding what their strengths and weaknesses are, anatomically—the way your hand is shaped, the way your mind works, et cetera—and play to those strengths and weaknesses.”