The Secret Wisdom of Trees
Trees want sunlight. Nutrients produced through photosynthesis fuel a tree’s growth. But the strongest and longest-living trees don’t get much sunlight during their early years. Instead, they spend their first few decades “waiting patiently in their mothers’ shade,” Peter Wohlleben explains in The Secret Wisdom of Nature. Limited sunlight leads to slow growth. Slow growth leads to the development of dense, long-lasting wood. Youngsters without any shade, on the other hand, grow fast and therefore develop wood that is airy and susceptible to fungi, yeasts, molds, and mildews. So, Wohlleben writes, “A tree that grows quickly rots quickly.” Tradeoffs between a good thing in the short run and a great thing in the long run—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6.
The Art of Patience
Not long after writing an article about Stoicism for Tim Ferriss’ website in 2009, Ryan Holiday got an offer from a small publisher to write a book about Stoicism. “It was as if everything I had hoped for was coming together,” Ryan writes. At the time, Ryan was working for Robert Greene—before he accepted it, he told Robert about the offer. Robert’s advice was to turn it down. He said that, since Ryan was still learning and gathering life experience, the book would be much better if he waited. “He was teaching me the art of patience,“ Ryan writes. “And he was right.” Ryan ultimately published a book about Stoicism, The Obstacle is the Way, five years later. “If I had taken the deal I had gotten offered in 2009,” Ryan recently told me, “my entire life would have been different.”
Shut It Down
John Mayer makes a distinction between bringing a song to life and finishing a song. “Bringing a song to life is always the fun part,” he said. “But then you have to put on a lab coat and cancel everything—you’re not going out tonight, you’re not seeing your friends, you’re not going to dinner—there’s work to do.” He says he commonly meets artists who bring to life a lot of songs that they never finish. “They have a hard drive full of minute-and-a-half ideas that were just the spark and then they go out and have a good time with their friends. And then they move on to another spark and then to another spark and then to another spark.” Whereas, he said, “All the songs I play on stage now represent a night when I went, ‘Shut it down, we got work to do.’ Even if it’s three days of massive excavation, of 800 different takes on a verse, of wearing the same hoodie and sweatpants—it’s going to be over at some point, and when it’s over, you never have to do that work again, but you have that song for the rest of your life.”
The First Step For The Next 50 Years
In the early days of Sony, they designed and built a pocket-sized transistor radio. For a while, Sony’s co-founder Akio Morita struggled to sell the radio to U.S. distributors, but finally, he got some interest from a company called Bulova. “The people at Bulova,” Morita writes in Made in Japan, “liked the radio very much and their purchasing officer said very casually, ‘We will take one hundred thousand units.’ I was stunned. It was an incredible order, worth several times the total capital of our company.” But there was one condition: Bulova wanted their name on the radios. Morita had vowed that Sony would never make products for other companies. “We wanted to make a name for our company on the strength of our own products.” When Morita told the Bulova buyer that Sony would not produce radios under another name, the buyer said, “Our company name is a famous brand name that has taken over 50 years to establish. Nobody has ever even heard of your brand name. Why not take advantage of ours?” Morita replied, “50 years ago, your brand name must have been just as unknown as our name is today. I’m now taking the first step for the next 50 years of my company. 50 years from now, I promise you that our name will be just as famous as your company name is today.”
Get Off My Lawn Boy
In 1975, Sylvester Stallone wrote the screenplay for Rocky. He shopped the script to every producer and studio in Hollywood, but he was repeatedly rejected. Eventually, one production company, Chartoff-Winkler Productions, expressed interest. But there was one condition. They didn’t want Stallone to play Rocky. They wanted a “more marketable actor” for the leading role. In fact, they were so desperate for Stallone to not play Rocky that they kept offering him increasingly large sums of money to go away. “It went up to $360,000,” Stallone said, “to go away, to ‘get off my lawn boy.’” When later asked why he didn’t take the money, he said, “There was something about the idea of unrealized dreams.” “I always wanted to see if I could act,” he said. “And I knew that if I sold it—even for $500,000—I knew that after the money was gone, I would have become very bitter if I never realized my dream.” Rocky, starring Stallone, was released in 1976 and was the highest-grossing movie of the year, earning $225 million at the box office. Stallone was paid $35,000 for writing the movie and starring in it, but he negotiated a percentage of the movie’s profits and eventually made over $25 million from the movie.
Discipline Now…Freedom Later
On my desk, I have a notecard that just says, “Discipline now…Freedom later.” The price of making things easier on yourself in the future is often discipline in the present. And vice versa: the price of lazily kicking off my shoes with the laces tied, for instance, is making things harder on myself in the future.