Andy Warhol’s Favorite Thing To Say
In the mid-1950s, Andy Warhol had his heart broken. For a long time afterward, the thought of loving someone who didn’t feel the same made him miserable. Then in June 1956, Warhol wrote, “I was walking in Bali, and saw a bunch of people in a clearing having a ball because somebody they really liked had just died. And I realized that everything was just how you decided to think about it. Sometimes people let the same problems make them miserable for years when they should just say, So what. That’s one of my favorite things to say. So what.” He or she doesn’t feel the same way—So what. You didn’t win the gold medal—So what. Tomorrow is the biggest interview of your life—So what. “I don’t know how I made it through all the years before I learned how to do that trick,” Warhol continued. “It took a long time for me to learn it, but once you do you never forget.”
Realizing that everything is just how you decided to think about it, not letting the same problems make you miserable for years, saying, “So what”—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
But The Way I Choose To Look At It Is…
At both the 1988 & 1992 Olympics, speed skater Dan Jansen was the favorite to win the 500- & 1,000-meter races. He didn’t medal in either event at either Olympics. The media was brutal: “Jansen Chokes Again.” “Greatest Choke in Sports History.” “The Buffalo Bills of speed skating.” His agent reached out to performance psychologist Dr. Jim Loehr for help. “He’s been struggling, mentally,” Jansen’s agent told Loehr. “If we can get his head right, he’ll be an Olympic champion. If we can’t, he’ll go down as the greatest choker in sports history.” “I know about Dan’s story,” Dr. Loehr replied. “I’d love to work with him.” So Jansen started working with Loehr leading up to the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway. At the 1994 games, as he stepped to the starting line the 500, Jansen writes, “I told myself, This is your day…It’s medal time.” He got off to a strong start, and by the final turn, he was skating at world record pace. “I’m thinking, ‘You’re going to set a world record,’” Jansen recalled. “’This is it—you’ve got the gold.’” As he powered through the last turn, Jansen slipped. In a split second, his left arm brushed the ice. He quickly recovered, but in a race that’s decided by a few tenths of a second, a split second can cost you a medal. And it did. Jansen missed the podium by one and a half tenths of a second. After yet another disappointment, before the 1,000 (four days later)—which Jansen knew would be the last time he ever skated competitively—“We created a mindset,” Dr. Loehr said. “And the mindset we created was—instead of a gold medal or a world record or anything else—think about what a gift the sport of speed skating has been to you. Think about the joy it’s brought you.” Essentially, Jansen added, the mindset they created was to say “So what” to the possibility of going down as the greatest choker in sports history. A reporter said in a press conference before the 1,000, “Dan, if you leave these Olympics without a medal, you’ll probably be remembered as the greatest Olympian ever to never win one.” “Yes sir,” Jansen replied, “thank you for pointing that out. But the way I choose to look at it is that I’ve had the opportunity to become one of the greatest Olympians ever…Few people get that opportunity. I’m grateful to be one of them.” Deciding to think about it that way, deciding to say “So what” to the thought of never winning a gold medal, Jansen not only won his first Olympic gold medal, with a time of 1:12.43, he set a world record in the 1,000. “When I stopped thinking so much about a gold medal,” he said, “I won a gold medal.”
The Science of Choking Under Pressure
Whether an athlete in the Olympics, a musician on stage, or an employee giving a presentation—why do skilled, knowledgeable individuals sometimes “choke”? Why do they sometimes underperform in high-stakes situations? Social psychologists began studying this phenomenon—“choking under pressure”—in the early 1980s. In one of the original studies, after a series of experiments in both controlled lab settings and real-world scenarios, the psychologist Roy Baumeister proposed a hypothesis: “Under pressure, a person realizes consciously that it is important to execute the behavior correctly. Consciousness attempts to ensure the correctness of this execution by monitoring the process of performance. But consciousness does not contain the knowledge of these skills, so that it ironically reduces the reliability and success of the performance when it attempts to control it.” Baumeister uses the example of typing—consciously focusing on where each key is on the keyboard interferes with the part of the brain where those typing skills are stored, leading to more mistakes and slower typing than when typing without much deliberate thought. To test this hypothesis—that choking is essentially a function of misplaced attention—Baumeister began to explicitly shift participants’ focus, a process he calls a “private cognitive reorientation.” Similar to the way Dr. Loehr reoriented Jansen’s focus before his Olympic breakthrough, Baumeister devised various ways to get participants to not care about the outcome of their performance. In one experiment, for example, he offered participants a chance to win a large sum of money if they could exceed a certain performance bar—but he set that bar so high it seemed impossible to achieve. Convinced they had no chance of winning, participants invariably performed better than they had even under low-pressure conditions. Whenever the experiment setup led participants to “give up” on the outcome, whenever they said “So what,” “whenever they dissociated themselves from the performance pressure by choosing to disregard the incentive,” Baumeister writes, “subjects showed substantially superior performance…avoiding the effects of pressure by internally abandoning the goal.”
If It Don’t Work Out…
On May 2, 1972, Bruce Springsteen auditioned for the record producer John Hammond. Hammond had signed icons like Bob Dylan and Aretha Franklin—two of Springsteen’s heroes. “I would’ve been in a state of complete panic,” Springsteen writes in Born To Run, “except on the way up in the elevator, I performed a little mental jiu-jitsu on myself. I thought, ‘I’ve got nothing so I’ve got nothing to lose. I can only gain should this work out. If it don’t, I still got what I came in with. I make my way through the world as myself and I’ll still be that person when I leave no matter the outcome.’” By performing a little mental jiu-jitsu, by deciding to say “So what” to the possibility that he could leave the audition without a record deal, Springsteen said that instead of panicking, he walked into the audition feeling confident. He performed his song, “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City.” “When I was done I looked up,” Springsteen writes, “and I heard him say, ‘You’ve got to be on Columbia Records…That was wonderful.’” Springsteen signed a ten-album deal and would go on to record with Hammond and Columbia Records for the next fifty years.
Bad Poetry Might Make Some Good Songs
After retiring from comedy, Steve Martin started trying to make music. He struggled to write songs for a while, constantly frustrated by the thought that his songwriting didn’t match the quality of his comedy writing. Eventually, he decided to think about the process of writing songs differently, to dissociate from the pressure to write “good” songs—at one point while reading the book The Stuffed Owl (which is a collection of bad poetry), Martin said, “I put it down and thought—just as a joke—‘I’m going to write some bad poetry!’ … So I wrote some bad poetry. And eventually I looked at it and thought, ‘this is some bad poetry, but it might make some good country songs.’” Thinking of it that way, Martin decided to turn the bad poems into songs, which became the album, The Crow: New Songs for the Five-String Banjo, which won a Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album in 2010.
Who Cares?
The legendary snowboarder Shaun White was asked about how he would mentally prepare for an Olympic run. He said he had the same routine before every big competition. Before he dropped into the halfpipe, Shaun said, “I say, ‘Who cares?’ At the end of the day, Who cares? What’s the big deal? I’m here, I’m going to try my best, and who cares? I’m going to go on from this regardless of what happens. Even though my whole world is wrapped up in this…Who cares?” So what.