You’re Only As Good As You’re Willing To Be Bad
Randall Stutman, coach to some of Wall Street’s biggest CEOs, was asked what lesson from his parents has most stayed with him. “My parents always believed in an expression I still use,” he said. “You’re only as good as you’re willing to be bad.” Try. Expose yourself. Take the risk. Put your work out there. Hit the publish button. “The fact that you’re not going to be good at something or that you’re going to fail at something—that’s OK. Because you’re never going to get good unless you’re willing to be bad.”
Focus On The Cast Not The Catch
Seth Godin once took a fly-fishing lesson. He asked the instructor if he had a fly without a hook. That’d sort of be like going bowling and asking the lane master to pull up the pins, so you can just focus on your technique. The fly-fishing instructor looked at Godin with confusion then found him a hook-less fly. “The next few hours were extraordinary,” Godin writes in The Practice. “My friends were busy trying to catch something…They were willing, hoping, and imploring the fish to somehow bite the hook. Relieved of this easily measured outcome, I could focus on the practice alone.” Of course, Godin acknowledges, at some point, you gotta bring home the fish. “But the catch is the side effect of the practice itself. Get the cast right, and the fish will be caught, or they won’t.
In The Space Provided By A Deep Breath
In the second episode of “7 Days Out,” Eleven Madison Park restauranteur Will Guidara catches a mistake made by his electrical contractor. We can tell Guidara considered losing his temper on the guy buy makes the choice not to. Guidara was later asked what was going through his head in that moment—how/why did you keep your composure? For some context, he described the “Make It Nice Field Manual”—his restaurant group’s internal collection of the principles/philosophies that guide what they do. One of those principles is, “DBC”—Deep Breathing Club. DBC comes from Guidara’s longtime friend who, along with setting up and running a recording studio in a psychiatric hospital to try to make therapy cool, became disenchanted with the amount of medication prescribed across the medical world and set out to find better modalities. That led to his discovery of deep breathing’s power to heal and soothe and connect. “Restaurants,” Guidara explains, “are not altogether that much different from a psychiatric hospital.” Restaurants, he says, are about relationships and service and catering to each customer’s needs and reacting to what is thrown at you. So, Guidara says, the worst thing anyone can do in a restaurant is lose their cool. And sometimes, just taking a deep breath reminds you of what you’re trying to accomplish.” In that space provided by the deep breath, Guidara said he was thinking about his ultimate objective. Then he worked backwards to a response that gave him the best chance of getting there. The ultimate objective was not to make himself feel better by making someone else feel worse. “And there is no good that is going to come out of being mean.”
The Small Choices Tell Us More
As Michael Lewis writes in The Undoing Project, Harvard psychologist once asked Amos Tversky why he became a psychologist. “It’s hard to know how people select a course in life,” he said. “The big choices we make are practically random. The small choices probably tell us more about who we are. Which field we go into may depend on which high school teacher we happen to meet. Who we marry may depend on who happens to be around at the right time of life. On the other hand, the small decisions are very systematic. That I became a psychologist is probably not very revealing. What kind of psychologist I am may reflect deep traits.”
In Praise of Nonreligious Prayer
When award-winning filmmaker Peter Farrelly quit his job to be a writer, he gave himself four years. If in four years nothing was happening with the writing, he’d go back to a regular job. Most mornings, “I’d wake up,” he said, “and think, ‘oh f*ck, you idiot, what are you doing? You’re sitting in some motel room that you rented for ten dollars a night, and you got nothing in your life,’ and I started praying…‘It’s just me and you, whoever you are out there. If you’re there, help me out. Just take me in the right direction.’ And I still always do pray. It’s not a religious thing at all. But I still do it. When I get up in the morning—you take your lumps in this business—so I’m like, ‘come on, please help me get through this. I want to be a good guy, I want to keep a positive attitude—help me out.”
Pick A Date
Tommy Kail, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Alex Lacamoire—in just about every interview in which they are asked about Hamilton—talk about the turning point in creating Hamilton. Lin-Manuel wrote the first song, “Alexander Hamilton,” in 2009. He finished the second, “My Shot,” in 2011. He performed “My Shot” in front of a hundred people or so at Ars Nova in 2011. Everyone loved it. And at the post-show cocktail party, everyone told Lin-Manuel that they loved it. Fresh off the warmth of the applause—“that’s usually a good time to strike,” Kail said. So when he got his chance at that post-show party, Kail went up to Lin-Manuel. “God, everyone thinks you’re amazing,” Kail said to him. “But you’ve got two songs for this album [the original idea for Hamilton was for it to be a concept album], and you started writing it in 2009 and it’s almost 2012…I feel like you should hurry up. So let’s pick a date—six months from now, and just write two songs a month and let’s just see what happens.” Flush from the success of that night, Lin-Manuel said, “I can do that!” “I know you can,” Kail said. And he did. Lacamoire mentions a quote he once heard, “If it weren’t for deadlines, nothing would get done.”