What You’re Made For
After a dominant high school basketball career, George Raveling went to Villanova where, joining a team full of great players, he struggled to get playing time. “To earn a starting spot,” George writes in his new book What You’re Made For: Powerful Life Lessons from My Career in Sports, “I needed to find a way to stand out.” He looked around—at his teammates’ strengths and weaknesses, what areas of the game guys stayed after practice to work on, the kinds of drills that filled practice time. “Nobody seemed to be a great rebounder,” George writes. “No one was staying after practice to work on their rebounding. No practice ever included a rebounding drill.” So George decided to become a great rebounder. “If I got great at rebounding, I thought, the coaches would play me. There’s no way that they’re not going to play a guy who secures more possessions for the team.” He stayed after practice to work on rebounding, creating drills to improve his reaction time and positioning. He studied film to track rebound patterns. In the weight room, he trained his lower body to become immovable under the basket. “Pretty soon,” George writes, “I was the rebounding guy.” Pretty soon, he earned a starting spot and a reputation as one of the best rebounders in college basketball, setting multiple rebounding records during his time at Villanova and later writing the first book on rebounding, War On The Boards. “At the time,” George writes, “I wouldn’t have thought of it as a strategy, but that’s exactly what it was. And it’s a strategy that works in any field: find something that’s under-appreciated, not being addressed, or being overlooked, and get really good at it…If you become the foremost expert at something, you make yourself indispensable.”
Doing things that others overlook—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
John Lennon’s Tea
Music industry legend Jimmy Iovine got his start working as an assistant to the producer and engineer Roy Cicala. He swept the floors, set up equipment, restocked supplies, ran errands—he did whatever Cicala or the musicians recording in Cicala’s studio asked him to do. In 1971, when Cicala was producing John Lennon’s album Imagine, “I learned how to make John Lennon’s tea,” Iovine said. It was a small task—something that many might overlook or dismiss as inconsequential. Not Iovine. “I was like the way I am about everything with that tea,” he said. “I perfected it. I timed it exactly. Lennon wouldn’t let anybody else make it.” Iovine made himself indispensable, “and then,” he said, “as time went on, Roy—like all of us do—began handing bigger things off to me.” On Easter Sunday 1973, Cicala called Iovine—then 20 years old—and said, “I need you to come in today to answer the phones.” When Iovine told his Mom he had to go to work, she said, “Are you crazy? It’s Easter Sunday!” When he got to the studio, Cicala and Lennon were there laughing. “What are you guys laughing at?” Iovine asked. “We wanted to see if you would come in on Easter Sunday. The assistant engineer can’t make it. John wants you to do it.” Iovine got his first credit as assistant engineer on Lennon’s 1973 album, Mind Games. He would go on to work on six of Lennon’s albums, including Walls & Bridges and Rock ‘n’ Roll, gradually building a reputation that would lead to him engineering and producing albums for Bruce Springsteen, Patty Smith, Tom Petty, Stevie Nicks, and on and on. It all started, Iovine said, because “I was obsessive about that fucking tea.”
The Mundanity of Excellence
In the 1980s, the sociologist Daniel Chambliss spent 5 years studying swimmers at every level of ability. In 1989, he published his research in a paper, “The Mundanity of Excellence.” Essentially, Chambliss found that Olympic champions don’t train more than the average swimmer. Instead, they train differently. In particular, they do “what others see as boring.” Take the three-time Olympic gold medalist, Mary T. Meagher. When Meagher was 13 years old, after she clarified her goal of one day breaking the 200 Meter Butterfly world record, Meagher made two mundane changes to her routine. First, she decided she would never again arrive late to a practice. Second, she decided that during every practice, she would make every turn as if it were an Olympic race. Where most swimmers allow themselves to swim more casually in practice than in competition, Meagher didn’t. This, she said, habituated her to being a little bit better than those around her. On any given day, these two changes would have little to no noticeable impact. We can imagine there were days where Meagher felt the frustration of putting in work that doesn’t immediately pay off. But over time, being a little bit better day after day, the impact becomes glaring. In 1981, at the age of 17, Meagher had one of the great performances in competitive swimming history: at the U.S. Swimming National Championships, she set world records in both the 200- and 100-Meter butterfly. Towards the end of his paper, Chambliss tells the story of a group of coaches from around the world visiting a U.S. Olympic Team practice. “The visiting coaches were excited at first…then soon they grew bored, walking back and forth, glancing down at their watches, wondering, after the long flight out to California, when something dramatic was going to happen.” “They all have to come to see what we do,” the U.S. Olympic Team coach said. “They think we have some big secret.” There is no secret. There is only doing the mundane, boring, under-appreciated, overlooked work, day after day.
I Didn’t Want To Get Kicked Out
In just about every interview I’ve read or listened to, Jerry Seinfeld says some version of, “the most seminal event of my career happened in 1976.” For a comedian in 1976, getting invited to perform on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson—a late-night talk show on NBC—was the equivalent of an athlete getting drafted into the pros or an actor getting cast in their first Hollywood movie. Getting on The Tonight Show, struggling, and not getting invited back—that was the equivalent of getting cut from the pros or never getting cast in another movie. “And I saw comedians get on The Tonight Show,” Seinfeld explained, “do well, go on again, do not as good, go on a third time, struggle, and you’d never see them again.” “That was something you noticed?” he was asked. “I noticed that, as a young man in 1976. I went, ‘Oh, I see how this works…I have to have a system for continually coming up with material.’ And so I set about creating that for myself.” In a book by the comedian George Burns, Seinfeld read that every day, Burns would sit down with a pad and a pen and work on jokes for at least two hours. “Which I had never heard of,” Seinfeld said. “I didn’t know anybody that did that.” The comedians he knew all did essentially the same thing: they’d carry around a notebook and randomly jot down ideas to test and refine on stage. “Everybody was just kind of doing it on stage,” he said. “And I think to this day, most comedians do that—they catch hold of an idea and take it on stage.” After noticing the trend of comedians doing increasingly worse on The Tonight Show and reading about Burns’ writing routine, Seinfeld started doing what most of his fellow comedians didn’t do—every day, he’d sit down with a pad and a pen and work on jokes for at least two hours. “I thought, ‘if I’m gonna get on The Tonight Show three times a year and crush every one of them, this has gotta be a serious endeavor.’ Because I loved it so much. And I didn’t want to get kicked out. I saw so many people get kicked out.” Writing for at least two hours every day, he said, “I found I was coming up with a lot of stuff,” he said. “And I started progressing and going past people.“ In 1981, he was invited to make his first appearance on The Tonight Show. He did well, got invited back a second time, a third time, and after making frequent appearances on the show over the next eight years, in 1989, Seinfeld got his own show, the sitcom Seinfeld, on NBC. “If you go from that moment in 1976 to when I got the TV series,” he said, “and I roll a blank sheet of paper into a typewriter, I was not intimidated by that because I’d been looking at blank sheets of paper for years by that time. I knew how to write.”
The Common Denominator of Success
At the National Association of Life Underwriters annual convention in 1940, a man named Albert Gray delivered a speech titled “The Common Denominator of Success.” Gray began looking for the common denominator years earlier when he became a supervisor. For the first time, he had a team of people under him, each trying to achieve success. “I was brought face to face,” Gray said, “with the disturbing realization that I was trying to supervise and direct [their] efforts…without knowing myself what the secret of success really was.” So he read biographies and autobiographies, dissertations and the latest research. “The common denominator of success,” Gray came to understand, “the secret of success of everyone who has ever been successful—lies in the fact that they formed the habit of doing things that failures don’t like to do.” What are the things that failures don’t like to do? “The very things that you and I and other human beings, including successful men, naturally don’t like to do. In other words, we’ve got to realize right from the start that success is something which is achieved by the minority of people, and is therefore unnatural and not to be achieved by following our natural likes and dislikes nor by being guided by our natural preferences and prejudices.” You’ve probably wondered, Gray continues, why it is that those who are the best at what they do seem to like to do the things that you don’t like to do. “They don’t! … Then why do they do them? Because by doing the things they don’t like to do, they can accomplish the things they want to accomplish.”
Do What Many People Won’t
Later, when George Raveling got into coaching, the legendary Bob Knight gave him this advice: “George, if you’re going to survive in this profession, you have to become the foremost expert in some phase of the game.” After a Hall of Fame coaching career, along with working as the Director of International Basketball at Nike, George became a mentor to multiple generations of coaches, athletes, executives, and entrepreneurs. “I often tell them something similar [to what Knight told him],” he writes in What You’re Made For, “Find a void and fill it. Find a critical skill or area that most people are overlooking and become the foremost expert. Whatever it is—a skill, a service, a demographic that’s underserved, a phase of the game that’s overlooked—if you become the foremost expert at something, you make yourself indispensable.” There’s that saying, “If you want something you’ve never had before, you have to do something you’ve never done before.” If you want something many people want—to be a starting player, a go-to music producer, a regular on The Tonight Show, a gold medalist, a high achieving life underwriter—you have to do what many people won’t.